Lawyer for doctor who helped US track down and kill Osama bin Laden is assassinated in Pakistan
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A lawyer for a Pakistani physician who helped U.S. military forces track down and kill Osama bin Laden in 2011 has himself been killed in a vehicle ambush in Pakistan.
Attorney Samiullah Afridi died of his injuries while being treated at a hospital in Peshawar after the Tuesday shooting, according to the Express Tribune. He had recently returned from spending three months abroad, following death threats, according to the newspaper and the News Tribe.
Although his attackers are not known, a Taliban splinter group says it is responsible. “We claim responsibility for the killing of Shakil Afridi’s defense lawyer,” a Jamatul Ahrar spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said in a Tuesday telephone interview with the Express Tribune. He also told the newspaper that “Others who linked themselves to Afridi’s case should expect such action.”
An email from the group to news organizations also said others linked to the killing of Osama bin Laden would be targeted, reports the Voice of America.
Afridi’s former client, Dr. Shakil Afridi, is serving a 33-year prison sentence for conspiring against the state. Although many in the U.S. view the physician as a hero for operating a fake vaccination program that helped confirm bin Laden’s identity through DNA testing, he is viewed as a traitor at home for helping a foreign spy agency with an illegal mission. His sentence was reduced in 2014 and his case remains under appeal.
A Daily Mail page provides a link to a video in which Samiullah Afridi said he regularly received death threats against both himself and his family and had decided to quit representing the physician because of them.
