‘Osama bin Laden dressed as woman’, 'Pakistan can’t win war with India’: Imran Khan’s party demands apology from ex-CIA officer for his statements

John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who once led a counterterrorism operation in Pakistan, said that the former Prime Minister Imran Khan's political party had sent him a letter. It has asked him to apologise to Pakistan for saying that the country can never win a war from India. He reacted to the letter during a podcast with internet personality Julian Dorey, expressing his amusement at the letter.

This was after a series of claims he made in an interview with the Indian news agency ANI, where he said that the White House had "expected India to strike back after the 2001 and 2008 attack" by Pakistan. He also talked about how Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden escaped from the Tora Bora mountains into Pakistan.

“We knew we had Bin Laden cornered. We told him to come down the mountain,” Kiriakou said. Bin Laden asked for time until dawn, claiming he needed to evacuate women and children.

“But then,” Kiriakou said, “Osama bin Laden dressed as a woman and escaped under the cover of darkness in the back of a pickup truck into Pakistan," he added.

The former CIA officer even claimed that the US had "purchased" the then-Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. He said this after remarking that “the United States loves working with dictators.” According to him, Washington paid “tens of millions of dollars in cash to the Pakistani intelligence service.”