REPORTS ARE EMERGING that the head of Pakistan’s intelligence service may step down in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The Daily Beast reports today that senior officials say that “an important head has to roll”, and soon, and the most likely candidate for this is Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha.

Pasha is the director general of the country’s spy agency, the Inter-Service Intelligence directorate.

The site states that Pakistanis are furious that the ISI and the military did not know that the leader of al Qaeda was hidden away in Abbottabad, and that they did not know American helicopters had entered Pakistani airspace.

While the reports aren’t confirmed, the Daily Beasts states that Pasha’s resignation would be the “first step in a process of rebuilding that badly damaged confidence”.

But was bin Laden’s hiding place really that big of a secret – or was he dead already?

• In October of last year, a NATO official told CNN that bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri were hiding close to each other in houses in northwest Pakistan.
• And around the same time, Richard Holbrooke, the special US envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, said: ”We hardly have a day that goes by where somebody doesn’t say they know where Osama bin Laden is”.
• Back in 2008, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour told HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher that a US intelligence officer told her that bin Laden was living “in a nice comfortable villa” in Pakistan.
• But Pakistan People’s Party leader Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in December 2007, said in an interview with the BBC’s David Frost a few months before her death that bin Laden had been murdered, describing a man named Omar Sheikh as “the man who murdered Osama Bin Laden”.
• And many pointed out that in recent videos of bin Laden, his beard had changed from white and black to completely black.

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