Bin Laden's CIA doctor denigrated

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Bin Laden's CIA doctor denigrated



THE doctor jailed for 33 years by a Pakistani court for his role in finding Osama bin Laden, was corrupt and lured by easy money, Pakistani government officials have alleged, in attacks seen as retribution for his work in helping America.

Dr Shakeel Afridi, the doctor who helped the CIA find bin Laden by conducting a fake hepatitis B vaccine drive in the neighbourhood where the terror kingpin was living last year, was a hard-drinking womaniser, previously accused of sexual assault, harassment and stealing, and obsessed with making easy money, several government officials have said.

A personnel file shown to Reuters, purportedly from the health department and written in 2002, says Afridi was ''unfit for government service''.
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''Keeping in view his extreme lust for money, I am ashamed to even call him a doctor. He is a corrupt, unreliable and low category officer,'' the report said.

Tariq Hayat, formerly the highest-ranking government official in the Khyber tribal region, said he fired Afridi and expelled him from the Khyber because he was a ''characterless person'' and a ''thief''...

...Last week, Shakeel Afridi was sentenced to 33 years' jail under raj-era frontier crimes laws, by a tribal court in the Khyber.

He is in solitary confinement at a Peshawar prison for fear terrorist prisoners will attack him.

Already, members of the Pakistani Taliban have said they will ''kill him wherever they find him'' and plans have been made to move Afridi to the Punjab...

...A Senate committee also voted to symbolically withhold $33 million in aid, $1 million for every year of Afridi's sentence. The US will still give Pakistan about $1 billion this year.

But in a further demonstration of the parlous state of relations, the new head of Pakistan's spy agency has postponed indefinitely his first trip to Washington. Inter-Services Intelligence director-general, Lieutenant-General Zaheer ul-Islam put off the visit ''due to his pressing commitments''.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/bin-l...529-1zhag.html