Pakistan sacks doctor who helped track down bin Laden

PAKISTAN: Pakistan yesterday sacked a government surgeon recruited by the CIA to help find Osama bin Laden, officials said, amid calls for him to face treason charges.

Doctor Shakeel Afridi, who is in custody, was fired on disciplinary grounds by the government in northwest province Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where bin Laden was killed during a clandestine US raid last May that humiliated Pakistan.

"The government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has issued a notification of dismissal of Dr Shakeel Afridi," provincial health secretary Ashfaq Khan told AFP.

Seventeen other medics who worked on the same fake vaccination programme set up by the CIA in a bid to confirm the Al-Qaeda chief was living in the city of Abbottabad have already been sacked from their government posts, he added.

Fifteen women health workers were dismissed last August, and a woman doctor and an assistant coordinator were sacked on March 17, Khan told AFP.

Afridi, who worked for years as a government surgeon in the lawless tribal district of Khyber, is in police custody and a panel investigating the bin Laden raid has recommended that he be put on trial for treason.

Pakistani officials believe Afridi may have known about bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad and shared the information with US intelligence agents. In January, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta confirmed Afridi had worked for US intelligence by collecting DNA to verify the 9/11 mastermind's presence, and expressed concern about Pakistan's treatment of him. AFP