Osama killing: Musharraf denies 'secret deal' with US

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Dubai, May 10 (ANI): Former Pakistan President Perverz Musharraf on Tuesday denied the existence of any 'secret deal' with the US that allowed America to carry out a unilateral operation against Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. A private television channel quoted a statement from Musharraf's office in Dubai, as saying: "There was never a verbal or written agreement on this. There is no truth to the Guardian article." According to the newspaper, " Ten years ago the US and Pakistanagreed that Washington will carry out a unilateral operation against Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil if he was found there following which Islamabad would vociferously protest the incursion." The then US President George Bush struck the deal after bin Laden escaped US forces in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains in late 2001, the Guardian newspaper reported. Under the deal, Pakistan would allow US forces to conduct a unilateral raid on its soil in search of bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Afterwards, both sides agreed, Pakistan would vociferously protest the incursion, the paper quoted serving and retired Pakistani and US officials as saying. "There was an agreement between Bush and Musharraf that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him," said a former senior US official familiar with the counter-terrorism operations. "The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn't stop us." A senior Pakistani official said it had been struck under Musharraf and renewed by the army during the "transition to democracy" a six-month period from February 2008 when Musharraf was still president but a civilian government had been elected. Referring to the killing of bin Laden in Abbottabad compound near Islamabad, the Pakistani official said: "As far as our American friends are concerned, they have just implemented the agreement." The former US official said the Pakistani protests of the past week were the "public face" of the deal. "We knew they would deny this stuff." (ANI)