The militants accused in a court of conspiring with a doctor recruited by the CIA to find Osama bin Laden said Thursday they had nothing to do with him and threatened to kill him.
Shakeel Afridi was on May 24 sentenced to 33 years in jail after he was found guilty of treason under Pakistan’s archaic system of tribal justice.
He was arrested after US troops killed bin Laden in May 2011 in the town of Abbottabad where he set up a fake vaccination programme in the hope of obtaining DNA samples to confirm the Al-Qaeda leader’s presence. But he was convicted for treason over alleged ties to Lashkar-e-Islam and not for working for the CIA, for which the court said it did not have jurisdiction.
Lashkar-e-Islam, led by warlord Mangal Bagh, is a militant organisation feared for kidnappings and extortion in the tribal district of Khyber, where Afridi worked for years as a doctor. The court said Afridi had “close links” to the group, saying the doctor’s “love” for Bagh and “association with him was an open secret”.
But a spokesman and a commander in the organisation both told AFP that they had nothing to do with Afridi. “We have no link to such a shameless man. If we see him we’ll chew him alive,” the commander said on condition of anonymity. The spokesman, who gave his name as Ghazi Hussain, branded Afridi a “traitor, an enemy of Pakistan and of the Muslim nation”. “Whenever and wherever we get an opportunity to kill him, we will. If we can, we will even kill him inside the jail,” Hussain told AFP.
The court said Afridi paid two million rupees ($21,000) to the faction and helped to provide medical assistance to militant commanders in Khyber.
But the group said the $21,000 was a fine imposed for over-charging patients.
“Afridi and his fellow doctor were fleecing tribesmen, giving them fake medicines and doing fake surgeries. We had a lot of complaints against them and imposed a fine of two million rupees on them,” the commander said. Local residents also told AFP that Afridi was fined for performing “unnecessary surgeries and over-charging” patients at his private clinic in the town of Bara.
Hussain rejected any alleged links with Afridi as “false and concocted”, saying he had been fined and expelled from Khyber “three or four years ago”. Pakistan’s umbrella Taliban faction also threatened Afridi’s life, criticising a sham trial that it said would allow the doctor to migrate to the United States.
“He is now top of our list. We will cut him into pieces when and where we manage to reach him,” spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told AFP by telephone. “This court judgement and punishment is all a drama, staged to hand him over to America,” Ehsan added.