Islamabad: A Pakistani doctor accused of assisting the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in obtaining DNA samples of Osama Bin Laden has been convicted of anti-state activities and sentenced to 33 years in jail by a tribal court, officials said.
Dr Shakil Afridi was taken into custody by the military's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) two weeks after Osama Bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011 in a raid by US Navy Seals on his hideout in the garrison town of Abbottabad in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakthtunkhwa province.
The middle-aged doctor, from the Afridi tribe, was charged with conducting a fake vaccination campaign in Abbottabad a month before the raid to get DNA samples to confirm Bin Laden's presence in the compound where he had been reportedly living for years with his wives and children.
A tribal court in Khyber tribal region near the provincial capital, Peshawar, tried the doctor under the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), a law inherited from the British colonial rule and in force in the seven federally-administered tribal districts along the Afghan border..
"Dr Shakil Afridi was produced before a four-member tribal court yesterday morning and was sentenced to 33 years in prison and also given a Rs3,20,000 fine," Political Agent, Khyber tribal region, Mutahir Zeb Khan said. The court also ordered confiscation of Afridi's assets including bank accounts.
Had Afridi been charged under Pakistani penal law, he would have faced the death penalty, as a judicial commission probing the circumstances of the raid that killed the Al Qaida leader had recommended that the doctor be charged with high treason. The FCR does not carry the death sentence.
Soon after his conviction by the court headed by deputy administrator responsible for the Bara region, Afridi was sent to the Central Prison in Peshawar.
Afridi is the first person to be sentenced by Pakistani authorities in the Bin Laden case. No one has yet been charged for helping the Al Qaida leader take refuge in Pakistan.
Supply routes
The imprisonment will almost certainly anger ally Washington at a sensitive time, with both sides engaged in difficult talks over reopening Nato supply routes to US-led troops in Afghanistan.
Senior US officials had made public appeals for Pakistan, a recipient of billions of dollars in American aid, to release Afridi, detained after the unilateral operation which killed Bin Laden and strained ties with Islamabad.
Tensions
In January, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said that Afridi and his team had been key in finding Bin Laden, describing him as helpful and insisting the doctor had not committed treason or harmed Pakistan.
US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher introduced legislation in February calling for Afridi to be granted American citizenship and said it was ‘‘shameful and unforgivable that our supposed allies'' charged him.
Afridi's prison term could complicate efforts to break a deadlock in talks over the re-opening of land routes through Pakistan to Nato forces in Afghanistan, which are crucial for supplies. Afridi's case highlighted severe tensions between Pakistan and the United States.
He was arrested soon after Bin Laden was killed, and has not been publicly heard of since. Seventeen health workers who worked with Afridi on the vaccination drive were fired in March, according to termination letters which described them as having acted "against the national interest".
— With inputs from Reuters
