New Delhi: The US did not share Osama bin Laden’s location with Pakistan due to lack of trust and past experiences of terrorists being informed with the information by Islamabad, former American defence secretary and ex-CIA chief Leon Panetta has said.
“When we discovered the location of this compound in Pakistan, it was located in a place called Abbottabad. Abbottabad is a centre for their intelligence services and the Pakistani West Point is located there as well,” Panetta told in an interview to WION TV.
Panetta was also the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director then.
The world’s most wanted terrorist Laden was killed in a covert raid by a US Navy SEAL team at his Abbottabad compound in Pakistan on May 2, 2011.
The compound was so huge that of three times the size of other compounds and it had 18-foot walls on one side and 12-foot walls on the other side with barbed wire around it.
Panetta said that former President Barack Obama decided not to share the location with Pakistan on the basis that whenever information was shared, the terrorists were tipped off and they suddenly vanish from the spot.
“Because of that concern and that lack of trust, very frankly, we decided not to inform the Pakistanis about the location of bin Laden and we did not inform them about the operation that we conducted because we were concerned that if we did that it was likely bin Laden would be advised to move,” he said.
“So, because of what we did I think we were able to be successful in the mission to go after bin Laden,” Panetta said.
