Sharif met Osama bin Laden five times: Ex-ISI official

Islamabad: Former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif has met Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden five times, says a former official of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), a claim hotly denied by Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N).

Speaking in ARY news programme "Eleventh Hour", the former ISI official and now chairman Defence of Human Rights organisation Khalid Khwaja claimed he had arranged meetings between bin Laden and Nawaz Sharif on bin Laden's request and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) chief had held five meetings with the Al Qaeda chief so far.

"I challenge the deniers of such meetings and can present solid evidences in this respect," Khwaja was quoted as saying by ARY News Wednesday.

He said hopefully Nawaz Sharif would not "tell a lie" in this regard.

He said he had met the Al Qaeda chief more than a hundred times "but not after the 9/11 incident".

However, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz has termed the claims of the head of Defence of Human Rights organisation as baseless.

The claims by Khalid Khwaja regarding the meetings between Nawaz Sharif and Osama bin Laden were "meaningless", the party's information secretary Ahsan Iqbal told ARY news.

Source: IANS