Washington: Dr Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA track down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was offered to leave Pakistan but he refused, US officials said.
Dr Shakil Afridi was sentenced 33 years in prison last week for treason charges.
The US officials, according a foreign news agency, said the resettlement offer for Afridi came about the time of the May 2 raid last year in which US Navy SEAL commandos killed Osama at his complex in Abbottabad.
The officials said Afridi was welcome to settle in US with his family but he refused to do so. However, the reasons for Afridi’s refusal were unclear.
Afridi was accused of running a fake vaccination campaign in Abbottabad and used cheek swabs to try to gather DNA from bin Laden s children to confirm the identity of those living in the compound, Dunyanews.tv reported.
The DNA effort ultimately did not succeed but US sources have told Reuters he helped American operatives locate and follow the bin Laden courier who led them to the Abbottabad hideout.
The offer for Afridi to leave Pakistan was confirmed independently by two US officials, however, he White House and State Department declined comment on the matter.
Afridi’s case has damaged US-Pakistan relations with outraged U.S. senators voting last week to cut aid to Pakistan by $33 million – $1 million for each year of the doctor s prison sentence.
Pakistan has said Washington should respect its court s decision.
Pakistani authorities arrested Afridi several weeks after the bin Laden raid. In the intervening period, US authorities believed they would have had ample time to get him out of the country if he had wanted to leave.
“Before he was arrested, Dr Afridi was offered opportunities to leave Pakistan with his family but he turned those down,” one of the US officials said.
“Some may question why he did this but no one, including the doctor, could have foreseen that Pakistan would punish so severely someone whose work benefited the country so much,” the official said.
Another official said it was not usual for people in Afridi’s situation to reject resettlement offers. The official said Afridi may have believed that rather than becoming the object of character attacks and accusations of treason by Pakistani authorities, he might instead have won praise for his role in helping rid Pakistan of a threat to its security and stability.
Afridi’s brother Jamil has described the treason charges as baseless and said the doctor was being made a scapegoat.
“If my brother had done something wrong, he had a valid US visa. He could have fled the country,” Jamil said after the sentence was handed down. The family had received no offers of help from the US government, he added.
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