Osama paper blames LeT's ‘treachery’ for al Qaeda leaders' arrests

'Treachery' by close ally Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), along with weaknesses like the excessive use of internet, was suspected to be a key factor behind the arrest of two top al Qaeda commanders — Abu Yasir and Abu Zubaydah — in Pakistan and the fall of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, a newly declassified document seized from Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound shows.

“Treachery” by close ally Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), along with weaknesses like the excessive use of internet, was suspected to be a key factor behind the arrest of two top al Qaeda commanders — Abu Yasir and Abu Zubaydah — in Pakistan and the fall of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, a newly declassified document seized from Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound shows.

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“The arrest of Abu Yasir, due to his excess (sic) in responding frequently on the internet or the treachery of Lashkar-e-Taiba,” said the document, titled ‘Lessons learned following the fall of the Islamic emirate’. The document was found during the US Navy Seals raid at the Abbottabad compound in May 2011 in which Laden and his son Khalid were killed.

The document, believed to have been authored by bin Laden and referring to the December 2001 collapse of the Afghanistan Taliban regime during the US “war on terror” that followed the 9/11 attacks, zeroed in on the LeT in a cryptic, 18-point post-mortem of the major reversals, said a counter-terrorism source who spoke to HT.

Yasir, who was considered close to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) — identified as the alleged principal architect of the 9/11 attacks, was arrested along with four others from a Lahore-based guesthouse in March 2003 by local authorities. “Qaeda suspected LeT’s role as the latter may have known about the hideout,” said the source.