Dr Shakil Afridi shifted to Sahiwal Jail from Adiala

PESHAWAR: Security personnel moved Dr Shakil Afridi, a doctor who helped the CIA track down Osama bin Laden in his Abbottabad compound, from Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail to Punjab’s Sahiwal prison amid tight security on Sunday.

A surgeon from Khyber district, Afridi ran a phony vaccination campaign in Abbottabad to help the US intelligence agency trace the former al-Qaeda chief on May 2, 2011. In 2012, he was sentenced to 33 years imprisonment and slapped with Rs320, 000 fine for links with banned militant groups. The sentence was handed down by the political administration of Khyber district under the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), the colonial era laws that governed of Pakistan’s tribal regions before the 31st Constitutional Amendment that merged Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP).

In 2014, the FCR commissioner commuted Afridi’s conviction by 10 years and reduced the fine by Rs01 million. After spending several years in a Peshawar prison, Afridi was moved to Adiala Jail upon requests from the provincial government. The KP government maintained that the surgeon’s life was in danger in Peshawar prison since it also housed hardcore Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants. The request had been denied by the federal government for a long time before finally moving him in April 2018.