Pakistan President says his forces were out of operation to kill bin Laden

PanARMENIAN.Net - Pakistan's President acknowledged for the first time that his security forces were left out of a U.S. operation to kill Osama bin Laden, but he did little to dispel questions over how the al Qaeda leader was able to live in comfort near Islamabad.

The revelation that bin Laden had been holed up in a compound in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, possibly for years, prompted many U.S. lawmakers to demand a review of the billions of dollars in aid Washington gives to nuclear-armed Pakistan.

"He was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone," Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, without offering further defense against accusations his security services should have known where bin Laden was hiding.

"Although the events of Sunday were not a joint operation, a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden as a continuing threat to the civilized world," he wrote, Reuters reports.

It was the first substantive public comment by any Pakistani civilian or military leader on the raid by a secret U.S. assault team on bin Laden's compound in the early hours of Monday. Pakistan has faced enormous international scrutiny since bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces, with questions over whether its military and intelligence were too incompetent to catch him themselves or knew all along where he was hiding.

The White House said intelligence on the compound had not been shared with any other country, including Pakistan, to ensure security.