Doctor Shakil Afridi, who helped CIA track down Osama bin Laden in 2011, has been shifted from Adiala Jail to Sahiwal prison amid strict security on Sunday (Today), said sources.
The sources said that Shakil Afridi was moved to Sahiwal Jail over security reasons. A surgeon from Khyber district, Afridi ran a 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 Pakistan’s tribal regions before the 31st Constitutional Amendment that merged Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P).
In 2014, the FCR commissioner commuted Afridi’s conviction by 10 years and reduced the fine by Rs1 million. After spending several years in a Peshawar prison, Afridi was moved to Adiala Jail upon requests from the provincial government.
The K-P government maintained that the surgeon’s life was in danger in the Peshawar prison since it also housed hardcore Tehreek-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.