Officially, Saudi Arabia was slow and casual in its reaction to the killing of its former citizen, al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, but Pakistani officials say that Saudis were deeply involved in the bin Laden episode and it was also their intelligence cooperation that helped the US finally get its nemesis, who had dodged its intelligence agencies for nearly a decade.
A statement on bin Laden’s killing by the official Saudi news agency quoted an unnamed official source as saying: “It will be a step towards supporting international efforts to combat terror and dismantle al Qaeda cells, apart from wiping out the deviant thought fuelling it.” The statement reflected as if it was not a matter of any significance for the Saudi authorities.
An officials, however, described it as totally the other way around and said that Saudis also had role in taking out bin Laden and they took great interest in his elimination. They said that Saudi intelligence officials had been in constant contact with the American spy networks for years and off late, they were also working with them to locate his whereabouts after signals from Pakistan started suggesting that bin Laden was in the South Asian country, the frontline state in the war on terror.
“Actually the Saudis, deeply perturbed by the popular uprisings in the rest of the Arab world, were also fearful of the same thing within its frontiers and in that context they were afraid that bin Laden, having some following in the kingdom, could exploit that situation to his advantage leading to deep chaos and anarchy there,” said a Pakistani diplomat here on Tuesday seeking anonymity.
“In addition to those concerns, they (Saudis) also had some intelligence reports that bin Laden and al Qaeda were reaching out to Iran – which is blamed by the Arab states for inflaming the anti-government sentiments in Yemen, Bahrain and other countries – for help to destabilise Saudi Arabia,” he said. He said that Saudi Arabia’s National Security Council Secretary General Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was earlier the Saudi envoy to Washington for years, visited Islamabad several days before bin Laden’s killing and one major purpose of that trip was to discuss the bin Laden issue with Pakistani authorities.
He said Interior Minister Rehman Malik also visited the kingdom after that, and before his trip to Riyadh he was in Tehran. He said all those visits were very important and focused on bin Laden. When asked whether all these trips and the Saudis’ deep interest showed that all the actors involved knew bin Laden’s whereabouts and perhaps what was going to happen to him, the diplomat refused to comment. A security official here told Pakistan Today that the Saudis’ assistance was there to track bin Laden and most likely, they also helped the Americans in tracing bin Laden’s courier, al-Kuwaiti, who took the Central Intelligence Agency to the doorstep of bin Laden in Abbottabad.
He said that Inter-Services Intelligence chief Lt General Ahmad Shuja Pasha had also visited Saudi Arabia a few days ago and he not only discussed the Pakistan-US row over the covert operation by American special forces in Abbottabad with Saudi officials, but also the whole issue of the al Qaeda chief, including the threats from his organisation to the kingdom.
