Osama had support network

Obama says Qaeda head had help in Pak,adds unsure if support came from within govt.

Osama bin Laden,who lived in a compound in Abbottabad for six years,had some kind of support infrastructure inside Pakistan and this aspect needs to be investigated,US President Barack Obama said. His comments came as his top security adviser said there was no evidence so far that the Pakistan government knew about the al-Qaeda chief’s presence in the country.

We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan, Obama told the CBS show 60 Minutes in his first public comment on the issue. The US called on government of Pakistan to conduct an investigation into how Osama was able to live so long in a military cantonment area of Pakistan,in an affluent suburb of Islamabad.

We dont know whether there might have been some people inside of [Pakistans government,people outside of government,and thats something that we have to investigate and,more importantly,the Pakistani government has to investigate, Obama said. The interview conducted Wednesday was scheduled to be aired Monday.

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Obama said the Pakistani government has indicated that they have a profound interest in finding out what kinds of support networks Osama might have had. But these are questions that were not going to be able to answer three or four days after the event. Its going to take some time for us to be able to exploit the intelligence that we were able to gather on site, he said,according to the excerpts.

Meanwhile,a top Republican Senator said on Sunday people connected with Pak military had knowledge of Osamas presence in Abbottabad.

It appears to me very logical that if Osama bin Laden was in that home for six years of time,a group of people there connected with the military,that a lot of people in Pakistan knew about his whereabouts, Senator Richard Lugar,told the CNN. Now the problem is that the divisions in the Pakistani government,between the ISI,the intelligence people,the military,the civilian,are very,very severe. Not really clear how many persons in each of these categories were informed or how they entered the dialogue within Pakistan.