#Saddam hussein capture physician free#

'The whole thing was totally irregular,' said one Pakistani official. It is not known exactly how the doctor hoped to get DNA from the vaccinations, although nurses could have been trained to withdraw some blood in the needle after administrating the drug. But in April, instead of administering the second dose in Nawa Sher, the doctor returned to Abbottabad and moved the nurses on to Bilal Town, the suburb where Bin Laden lived. The hepatitis B vaccine is usually given in three doses, the second a month after the first. In March health workers administered the vaccine in a poor neighbourhood on the edge of Abbottabad called Nawa Sher. Health visitors in the area were among the few people who had gained access to the Bin Laden compound in the past, administering polio drops to some of the children.Īfridi had posters for the vaccination programme put up around Abbottabad, featuring a vaccine made by Amson, a medicine manufacturer based on the outskirts of Islamabad. Bypassing the management of the Abbottabad health services, he paid generous sums to low-ranking local government health workers, who took part in the operation without knowing about the connection to Bin Laden.

#Saddam hussein capture physician free#

The doctor went to Abbottabad in March, saying he had procured funds to give free vaccinations for hepatitis B. So agents approached Afridi, the health official in charge of Khyber, part of the tribal area that runs along the Afghan border. The agency monitored the compound by satellite and surveillance from a local CIA safe house in Abbottabad, but wanted confirmation that Bin Laden was there before mounting a risky operation inside another country.ĭNA from any of the Bin Laden children in the compound could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present. The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an al-Qaida courier, known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, to what turned out to be Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound last summer. The US is understood to be concerned for the doctor's safety, and is thought to have intervened on his behalf. The doctor's arrest has exacerbated these tensions. Relations between Washington and Islamabad, already severely strained by the Bin Laden operation, have deteriorated considerably since then. The doctor, Shakil Afridi, has since been arrested by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) for co-operating with American intelligence agents.