Local residents try to look past the gates into the compound where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad May 4, 2011.
The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, which has been trying to cultivate less-hostile relations with Pakistan, has been careful not to directly accuse its nuclear neighbour of knowing that Osama bin Laden was living behind high walls topped with razor wire just an hour's drive from the capital, Islamabad. But the gloves came off today.
"Not only Pakistan, with its strong intelligence service, but even a very weak government with a weak intelligence service, would have known who was living in that house in such a location," said General Mohammad Zahir Azimi, the spokesman for the Ministry of Defence, in a press briefing this morning.
The General also predicted a spate of revenge attacks by al Qaeda sympathizers and said Afghanistan was reinforcing security precautions. His blunt statement on Pakistan contrasts with that of Mr. Karzai's chief spokesman, Waheed Omar, who had tried to finesse the Afghan position in the first hours after the news that the world's most-wanted terrorist had been killed by an American special forces team in the city of Abbotabad. "Obviously," Mr. Omar said then, "we are not trying to blame" Pakistan.