Dr Afridi’s conviction ‘unjust, unwarranted’, says Hillary Clinton

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday denounced as “unjust and unwarranted” the treatment of a Pakistani doctor Shakeel Afridi, who was jailed for 33 years for helping in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
A tribal court in Khyber Agency on Wednesday convicted Shakeel Afridi of treason after he agreed to have collected DNA for US intelligence to verify the presence of the most-wanted al Qaeda leader. “We regret both the fact that he was convicted and the severity of his sentence,” Clinton told a joint press conference with New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully.
The chief US diplomat said Afridi’s role “was instrumental in taking down one of the world’s most wanted murderers. That was clearly in Pakistan’s interest, as well as ours and the rest of the world’s”.
Afridi ran a fake vaccination program designed to collect bin Laden family DNA from the compound in Abbottabad, where the al Qaeda leader was shot dead in a US commando raid in May 2011.
The doctor’s actions “to help bring about the end of the reign of terror designed and executed by bin Laden was not in any way a betrayal of Pakistan”, Clinton said.
“We are raising his case and we will continue to do so because we think that his treatment is unjust and unwarranted,” she said.
Her remarks were stronger than those given on Wednesday by State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland who said Pakistan had “no basis for Dr Afridi to be held”.
Clinton also said the doctor’s fate was among “the many issues important to the United States and the international community” that the US was discussing with Pakistan’s leaders.
US lawmakers registered their own displeasure over Afridi’s sentencing, moving yesterday to cut military aid to Islamabad.
Senator John Kerry said Afridi’s sentencing will be hard for people in the US to understand or bear.
“Americans will have great difficulty knowing that one year after the United States found and killed the most notorious terrorist in modern history hiding on Pakistani soil, the most visible action being taken to find out how he came to be in Pakistan is the conviction in a Pakistani court of the physician who helped the United States identify Osama bin Laden,” he said.