03 May 2018•Update: 03 May 2018
By Aamir Latif
KARACHI, Pakistan
Pakistan on Thursday denied any secret deal with the U.S. to secure the release of a doctor who in 2011 helped the CIA track down slain Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
In a weekly press briefing in the capital Islamabad, Foreign Ministry spokesman Muhammad Faisal rejected reports that a deal was underway to swap Dr. Shakil Afridi with Aafia Siddiqui, a neuroscientist convicted in the U.S. in 2010 of seven counts of attempted murder and assault of an American soldier in Afghanistan.
"There is no such deal. All reports in this regard are baseless," he said.
Speculations about a possible deal triggered last week after Afridi, who is serving a jail sentence for having links to banned militant groups, was suddenly airlifted from Peshawar to Adiala jail in Rawalpindi.
They were further fueled by a report in Russian media outlet Sputnik that Pakistan's spy-agency foiled a CIA jailbreak plan to retrieve Afridi.
Afridi had initially been sentenced to 33 years in jail in 2012 however the sentence was later reduced to 10 years following his appeal against the judgment. Even though he was accused of running a parallel spy network for the CIA in Pakistan, he was never tried on those charges.
Bin Laden was killed in a U.S. Navy Seals operation in the garrison city of Abbottabad in May 2011, a move Islamabad saw as a violation of its sovereignty.
Since then diplomatic relations between the two allies have remained sour.
