The United States has said it has no reason to believe that the Pakistani leadership knew location of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden before he was killed in an American operation in Abbottabad in May 2011.
“As US officials have said, we have no reason to believe that anyone in the highest levels of the government knew about the location of bin Laden. That continues to be true,” Laura Lucas Magnuson, a spokesperson for the National Security Council at the White House said.
She was asked to comment on claims made in an article published in The New York Times on Wednesday that Pakistani intelligence had knowledge of bin Laden’s hiding place.
Reacting to allegations made in The New York Times story, the spokesperson of the Pakistan embassy in Washington DC noted that senior US officials “have on a number of occasions stated on record that they had seen no intelligence linking the government of Pakistan and any of its agencies to OBL’s presence in Abbottabad.”
“To still believe otherwise and to resurrect the issue through unnamed sources and unconfirmed reports does not deserve attention,” the embassy spokesperson added.