Via his Facebook page, General Pervez Musharraf has denied that he had agreed in 2001 for America to conduct a unilateral operation in Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden if the terrorist was located in Pakistan.
The Guardian newspaper reported this morning that after bin Laden managed to escape from the Tora Bora mountains, the General, who was then President of Pakistan, had struck a secret deal with then US President George Bush.
(Read: Musharraf allowed US operation against Osama in Pak?)Mr Musharraf said today, "The accusation of my having allowed intrusion into Pakistan by US forces chasing Osama Bin Laden is absolutely baseless. Never has this subject even been discussed between myself and President Bush leave aside allowing such freedom of action that would violate our sovereignty."
The Guardian cited a former senior US counter-terrorism official as declaring, "Both sides also agreed that Islamabad would vociferously protest the incursion afterwards in keeping with public sensitivities."
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. "There was an agreement between Bush and Musharraf that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him," the US official was quoted as saying.
The Guardian said a senior Pakistani official confirmed that the deal had been struck originally by Mr Musharraf and renewed by the army during the "transition to democracy" - a six-month period from February 2008 when Mr Musharraf was still president but a civilian government had been elected.