Muhammad Lila and Lee Ferran
ABC News
March 19, 2013
More than a dozen Pakistani nurses who were fired for their tenuous connection to a CIA plan to confirm Osama bin Laden’s location have been reinstated, a Pakistani court said today.
Seventeen nurses were originally let go in the wake of the May 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In the weeks after the operation, U.S. officials revealed that a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, had run a vaccination program on behalf of the CIA in Abbottabad in an effort to collect DNA from bin Laden family members.
The ploy was unsuccessful, but after it was made public, Afridi was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison for high treason and his nurses were fired. The Pakistani court that sentenced Afridi later released charging documents that claimed he was convicted not for his role in the CIA program, but for aiding a Pakistani terrorist organization — a claim the terror group denied.
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