A former agent of the CIA has revealed that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has died of natural causes five years before the US announced his death.

In an interview with Russia’s Channel One, Berkan Yashar, who is also a Turkish politician, said the US has not killed the al-Qaeda leader.

“In September of 1992, I was in Chechnya, that’s when I first met the man whose name was Bin Laden. This meeting took place in a two-story house in the city of Grozny; on the top floor was a family of Gamsakhurdia, the Georgian president, who then was kicked out of his country. We met on the bottom floor; Osama lived in the same building,” Yashar said.

According to the former CIA agent, he personally knew Bin Laden’s three Chechen bodyguards, who had protected him until his death and witnessed his death on June 26, 2006.

“Even if the entire world believed, I could not possibly believe it,” Yashar said. “I personally know the Chechens who protected him, they are Sami, Mahmood, and Ayub, and they were with him until the very end.”

“Only three Chechens buried him, according to his will” in the mountains on the Pakistan-Afghan border, he said.

Yashar added that the CIA abducted one of the bodyguards, Sami, before the announced killing of Bin Laden last year.

He says the bodyguard disclosed to the US the exact place of burial in the mountains.

“There was no assault. I know the American operations from the inside: they find the grave, dig out bin Laden and tell everyone about this. They need to show how technologically the security services worked, how each step was controlled, and then present it as a great victory to show that taxpayers are not paying taxes for nothing,” he said.

Washington announced on May 2, 2011 that Bin Laden was killed by US forces in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The lack of transparency over bin Laden’s death has cast further doubt over the announcement.