Summary: A lawyer for the doctor associated with Bin Laden’s death has been killed by a militant group.
Mere association counts as complicity in the minds of certain Pakistani militant groups. After all, they’ve just killed the former lawyer for a doctor who helped the CIA look for bin Laden in northwest Pakistan.
Dr. Shakeel Afridi was used by the CIA to set up a fake vaccination campaign to get DNA samples from Bin Laden’s children to determine if he was present in a compound in Abbattabad.
Alas, the children never came out to give DNA samples, but Bin Laden was finally killed in a U.S. raid on the compound in May 2011.
Shakeel Afridi was not informed that his efforts were part of the hunt for Bin Laden. Nevertheless, he has become unpopular in Pakistan for just that reason, and further has received a 23-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2012 of treason.
His lawyer, Samiullah Afridi, who is not related to the doctor, was shot in his car near the city of Peshawar on Tuesday. The gunman was not identified, but two groups are claiming responsibility for the attack.
The militant group Jundallah spoke through Fahad Marwat to CNN to claim they had a hit out for the man. Jundallah is a “kind of splinter group,” to Pakistani’s Taliban, and they’ve “been around a long time,” as CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen explained. “They’re extremely violent. They’ve been killing all sorts of religious minorities in Pakistan.”
Another group, a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, is also claiming the kill, saying Samiullah Afridi defended the doctor who was “a friend” of bin Laden’s killers.
Clearly the national sentiment was one of respect and devotion to one of the world’s most notorious terrorists.
Bergen further explained that the doctor was “a very unpopular figure in Pakistan,” for his supposed aid in killing Bin Laden, “and his lawyer, by extension, would also be seen as an unpopular person because of that perception.”
A further “extension” by this logic, has been attacking and murdering polio vaccinators. Last Wednesday an unidentified attacker killed such a vaccination worker in northwestern Pakistan. Often since this happened vaccine workers haven been viewed with suspicion, undercutting their ability to deliver the aid and help they would normally be welcomed to bring. The association of the trick with the national hero has laid suspicion on their work. Subtle connections count as deep bonds here.
News Source: CNN