Extradition ruled out: ISI advice to US: forget Dr Afridi

RAWALPINDI: The head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Lieutenant General Zaheerul Islam has said that the United States should forget Dr Shakeel Afridi, whose collaboration with Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped locate Osama bin Laden.

The ISI chief said that “the chapter of Dr Shakeel Afridi has been closed” and that Pakistan would never hand him over to the US.

Afridi ran a bogus vaccination programme designed to collect DNA samples from the bin Laden family when they were residing in the Abbottabad compound, where the al Qaeda leader was shot dead in a US raid in May 2011.

A tribal court in FATA had sentenced Dr Afridi to 33 years for agreeing to try and collect DNA sample for US intelligence in their bid to locate Osama.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 2^nd, 2012.