Intelligence sources on Wednesday said there was no truth in The New York Times report which said that the then ISI chief Lt General Ahmad Shuja Pasha knew of the presence of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad.
The sources said it was a totally baseless story and nobody in Pakistan knew about the presence of Bin Laden.
The denial was in response to an excerpt from a forthcoming book titled "What Pakistan knew about Bin Laden" by Carlotta Gall in The New York Times . The article says "Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden's house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad. The information came from a senior United States official, and I guessed that the Americans had intercepted a phone call of Pasha's or one about him in the days after the raid. "He knew of Osama's whereabouts, yes," the Pakistani official told me. The official was surprised to learn this and said the Americans were even more so. Pasha had been an energetic opponent of the Taliban and an open and cooperative counterpart for the Americans at the ISI. "Pasha was always their blue-eyed boy," the official said. But in the weeks and months after the raid, Pasha and the ISI press office strenuously denied that they had any knowledge of Bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad."
