ISLAMABAD: Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told parliament Monday that widespread allegations of official complicity or incompetence over Osama Bin Laden's Abbottabad hideout were “absurd”. Gilani made the comments during an address to parliament Monday, a week after a raid by US Navy SEALs in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad killed Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden. He said Bin Laden's killing was proper justice. He also rejected claims that Pakistani authorities were either incompetent in searching for Bin Laden or complicit in hiding him. He warned against unilateral actions by outsiders on his country's soil, but also says Islamabad's relationship with the US remains strong. He said that Pakistan has confidence in its military and intelligence services. He said that his country was not the birthplace of Al-Qaeda and could not be held accountable alone for the creation of the terror network. Pakistan has ordered an investigation into how Osama Bin Laden was able to live in the garrison city of Abbottabad undetected, Gilani told parliament. Meanwhile, Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik told an Arab satellite TV Monday he knew of the US raid which killed Osama Bin Laden only 15 minutes after its launch but had no idea of the target. “I was made aware of the operation 15 minutes after it started,” the minister told Al-Arabiya channel in an interview, but he was not aware of the target. Helicopter-borne US commandos carried out a raid lasting less than 40 minutes, killed Bin Laden and took away his body from a mansion near a Pakistani military facility outside Islamabad on May 2. Malik stressed there was “permanent cooperation in the security field” between Islamabad and Washington, despite US concerns about the reliability of their key ally in the “war on terror.” Following Islamabad's complaints about US “unilateralism,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said Washington took Pakistani complaints seriously but added: “we also do not apologize” for the raid. He said Obama was convinced that he had the “right and imperative” to mount the raid. Pakistan's main opposition party is stepping up calls for the prime minister and president to resign over the breach of sovereignty by US special forces who slipped in from Afghanistan to storm the compound where Bin Laden was holed up. “We want resignations, not half-baked explanations,” an official of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League told the News daily. “I think it is a big blow to Pakistan's sovereignty, Pakistan's independence and Pakistan's self-respect,” he said. Potentially stirring tension further, a Pakistani TV channel and a newspaper published what they said was the name of the undercover CIA station chief in Islamabad. The US embassy declined to comment, but said no one of that name worked at the mission in Pakistan.
