Dr Shakil Afridi relocated from Peshawar prison to ‘safe location’

Doctor who helped CIA track down Osama bin Laden is moved due to presence of hardcore TTP militants at the jail

PESHAWAR: Dr Shakil Afridi, a doctor who helped the CIA track down Osama bin Laden in his Abbaottabad compound and had been imprisoned at a Peshawar prison for the past several years, has been moved out of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

Speaking to The Express Tribune an official of the Central Prison Peshawar confirmed that in the afternoon a large number of police as well as army contingent reached the prison and took Dr Afridi away with them amid tight security.

“The entire road was blocked for a good one hour as large number of policemen and security personnel cordoned off the entire building and shifted Dr Shakil Afridi,” claimed the official, adding that they had no idea where the prisoner had been shifted.

Another official told The Express Tribune the man had most probably been moved out of the province but they had no idea where he was taken.



It is worth mentioning here that the provincial government had been demanding of the federal government to move Afridi away from the Peshawar prison as hardcore TTP militants had also been kept in the prison and his life was in danger.

The federal government for a long time declined to shift him but on Friday he was moved away in a sudden move.

Dr Afridi, the former surgeon of Khyber Agency, had run a phony vaccination campaign in Abbottabad to help the CIA track down the former al Qaeda chief in his compound and kill him in a controversial raid on May 2, 2011.

A year later, he was sentenced to 33 years in prison by the political administration of Khyber Agency under the Frontier Crimes Regulation, the colonial-era laws that govern Pakistan’s tribal regions, for having links with banned militant groups.