Jane Perlez

In an address to parliament, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani today defended the ISI and indirectly criticised the US for Osama bin Laden's presence in Pakistan.

Gilani's statement was expected to give an accounting of what Pakistan knew about bin Laden's presence in Pakistan, but instead centred on how the raid by the US was a breach of Pakistani sovereignty. He warned that a repeat, to capture other high profile terrorists, could be met with "full force".

Gilani repeated his assertion that bin Laden's presence in Pakistan was an intelligence failure of the "whole world", and said a senior general  adjutant general Lt Gen. Javed Iqbal, a close aide to army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani  would conduct an inquiry into the raid that killed bin Laden.

He gave no timeline of when the inquiry would be completed or who would participate in it.

In response to statements by officials in the Obama administration that elements in the ISI knew about bin Laden's hiding place and may have supported him, Gilani said it was "disingenuous" for anyone to blame the ISI or the army of being "in cahoots" with the al-Qaeda leader.

ISI chief Lt Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha and Gen. Kayani have been described by Pakistani officials as seething over the US raid, and the failure of the Obama administration to inform Pakistan in advance.

In apparent retaliation, the ISI appeared to have told a conservative Pakistani daily, The Nation, the name of the CIA station chief who is posted at the US embassy in Islamabad. A misspelled version of the station chief¿s name appeared in the Saturday edition of the paper.

In December, the prior CIA station chief had to leave Pakistan after he was publicly identified in a legal complaint sent to the Pakistani police by the family of victims of the American drone campaign. At the time, the US had said it believed that the ISI had deliberately made the name public.

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