Pakistan rejects claims of ‘harbouring’ Bin Laden

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari said his country was "perhaps the world's greatest victim of terrorism".

The opinion pieces follows in the wake of Bin Laden’s killing by US forces in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad despite how Pakistan was not involved in the raid. US officials said Bin Laden must have had a support system in Pakistan.

Currently, US officials are saying they are "99.9%" sure that the man they shot and killed in a raid on a secure compound in Abbottabad and later buried at sea was Bin Laden.

They said a video had been made of Bin Laden's burial but have not said yet whether it, or any photographs of Bin Laden's body, will be released.

The compound in Abbottabad is just a few hundred metres from the Pakistan Military Academy - the country's equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst – prompting White House counter-terrorism chief John Brennan to speculate that it was "inconceivable that Bin Laden did not have a support system" in Pakistan.

But Zardari said Pakistan had "never been and never will be the hotbed of fanaticism that is often described by the media".

"Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn't reflect fact," he said. “Pakistan had as much reason to despise al-Qaeda as any nation. The war on terrorism is as much Pakistan's war as it is America's."

He said Pakistan, which has suffered repeated terror attacks on its civilians and security services, had "paid an enormous price for its stand against terrorism".

"More of our soldiers have died than all of Nato's casualties combined. Two thousand police officers, as many as 30,000 innocent civilians and a generation of social progress for our people have been lost. "

Zardari added that Pakistan would not be intimidated by threats from al-Qaeda.

But Zardari said that although the two countries had not worked together on the operation – as the US has also said - "a decade of co-operation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama Bin Laden as a continuing threat to the civilised world".

Zardari however gave no explanation as to how Bin Laden had been able to live in relative comfort in Pakistan, but simply said he "was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be".

Bin Laden, his son Khalid, trusted personal courier Sheikh Abu Ahmed and the courier's brother were all killed, along with an unidentified woman. Bin Laden's wife was shot in the calf and was one of nine women taken into custody by Pakistani authorities, along with 23 children.