Pakistan said on Tuesday it was too early to say whether someone would be punished for failing to detect slain al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s decade-long stay in the country.
“It isn’t the time to ask this,” Information Minister Pervaiz Rashid said.
His comment came after a leaked government investigation into the killing of bin Laden blamed unnamed authorities for negligence and incompetence in failing to detect or capture him.
US Navy SEALs killed bin Laden in 2011 in his residential compound in the city of Abbottabad, about 100 kilometers north of Islamabad.
The government later formed an investigating commission. The findings were never revealed officially, but leaked to al-Jazeera television on Monday.
The document said bin Laden had been moving around undetected in various Pakistani cities for five years before settling in a fort-like compound near a military training facility.
The Information minister said the government was investigating how the report was leaked to media and whether its contents were authentic.
“Only the government was authorised to declassify the document,” Rashid said, “We will see who did it.” A Foreign Ministry spokesman refused to comment.
The powerful military, which controls security-related policies, did not offer any reaction. “We don’t want to comment to it,” said an official at the Army’s press office.
“Culpable negligence and incompetence at almost all levels of government can more or less be conclusively established,” the 336-page classified document said.
The report authored by a former Supreme Court judge did not fix responsibility on any person or group of people for failure to trace the presence of bin Laden in Pakistan or detect the US raid on May 2.
“It is unnecessary to specify the names as its obvious who they are,” the report said. “It may be politically unrealistic to suggest punishment for them.
“But as honourable men, they ought to do the honourable thing, including submitting a formal apology to the nation for their dereliction.”