Conspiracy theories fanned by distrust of the US raced like wildfire through a quiet Pakistani town after revelations Osama Bin Laden had been killed on their doorstep. Nestled in pine-dotted hills, the Bilal suburb of the relatively well-off garrison town of Abbottabad was the last place in Pakistan where people would ever imagine the world’s “most wanted” man lying low.
Unlike other parts of the conservative northwest, many people wear Western dress. Unlike Osama’s native Saudi Arabia, women drive cars and no-one who spoke to AFP said they had ever seen an Arab. Neighbours only realised something was wrong when helicopters roared overhead in the dead of night, followed by loud explosions and gunfire, jolting them from their sleep.
But it was not until they switched on their televisions that they heard US President Barack Obama announce the world’s most- wanted terrorist, with a $25 million price on his head, had been killed in their midst. Residents quickly went from astonished to disbelieving, delving into conspiracy theories that run deep in Pakistan and are underpinned by widespread suspicion towards the government’s official ally in the war on terror.
Bashir Qureshi, 61, who lives just a bean field away from where Osama was shot and whose windows were blown out in the raid, was dismissive.”Nobody believes it. We’ve never seen any Arabs around here,” he said laughing. “They (the US) said they had thrown his body to the sea! This is wrong, he was not here.” Even a policeman guarding the site questioned the motive for his posting. “I don’t believe he was there.
We were called to come at 3am but we’ve seen nothing, the operation was already over,” he said. Shakil Ahmed, who works for a pharmaceutical company, said he believed that the US desire to pull 130,000 international troops out of Afghanistan and wrap up a 10-year war against the Taliban was a motive for peddling lies.
“The US wants to quit Afghanistan. They are saying Osama is dead so they can have an excuse. They have tried to defame the Pakistani army by cooking up this story,” he said. “If he is killed, why don’t they show his body?” It was the lack of evidence presented by the Americans straight after the killing that perhaps did most to raise suspicions.
An American official said US forces administered Muslim religious rites for Osama on an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, before the body was eased overboard for a watery burial in a weighted bag. In Cairo, the top Sunni Muslim authority said Islam opposed burials at sea. In Pakistan’s city of Lahore, a prominent cleric questioned the hastiness with which it was done.
“It could create doubts and can trigger suspicions,” said Mufti Raghib Naeemi, whose father – Sarfraz Naeemi, an anti-Taliban scholar – was killed in a suicide attack in Lahore in 2009. The conspiracy theories were firmly batted aside by visiting US regional envoy Marc Grossman following pre-arranged talks with Pakistani and Afghan officials in Islamabad. “You can have as many conspiracies as you wish,” he said at a news conference, before adding: “He’s dead. It’s good”.
Defence analyst Imtiaz Gul said conspiracy theories were to be expected in a country where anti-Americanism is rampant, given that nobody had seen the body and that the nature of the covert operation raised so many questions. “Unless Americans present proof, it will remain a subject of speculation,” Gul said, “Because things are not transparent.”
“As nobody knew that he was living there, it raises many doubts like the Americans might have had him somewhere else and brought him along in an Apache. “Since there were no casualties in the helicopter crash it also raises the question whether it was Osama in that helicopter,” he said. Many Western analysts believe Pakistan is often in denial about the degree to which the state bears responsibility for nurturing militants, instead blaming Afghanistan and foreign powers for the woes facing the country.
“I still doubt that Osama had been been killed in Pakistan,” said IT professional Qaiser Khan, 55 in Karachi, used by NATO to ship the bulk of their supplies to troops fighting in Afghanistan. “The Americans might have killed him somewhere else – in Afghanistan – and played a Hollywood-like stunt here to defame our country.”
