The NY Daily News reports:

Before shooting Osama bin Laden, the CIA tried to give him a shot.

In an elaborate and ingenious plot to confirm the terror leader’s whereabouts, the agency set up a fake vaccination program in the Pakistani town where they believed bin Laden was hiding in a bid to obtain his DNA.

A Pakistani doctor who headed the Abbottabad vaccine drive for the CIA has been arrested by the Pakistani military, according to a report by McClatchy newspapers.

The detention of Dr. Shakil Afridi is worsening tensions between Washington and Islamad, the report said.

The CIA had painstakingly traced Bin Laden’s courier to a suspicious walled compound in Abbottabad, but the agency hoped to confirm the terror leader was holed up there before sending in a commando team, risking lives and iolating Pakistani sovereignty.

They didn’t even need bin Laden to show up for a shot himself: they were ready to compare DNA from any of Bin Laden’s children living at the compound to a DNA sample from his sister, who died last year in a Boston hospital.

Afridi began advertizing his Hepatitis B vaccine in March and started administering the drug in a poor neighbourhood of Abbottabad.

McClatchy said a nurse who was not told the true purpose of the mission managed to gain entry to the Bin Laden compound to administer the vaccines.

The doctor, who waited outside, told her to take a handbag fitted with an electronic device, McClatchy said, adding that it was unclear what the device was, or whether she left it behind.
The nurse, like many in Abbottabad, would not be interviewed.

Given the strong debate at the White House sparked by relatively low chances that Bin Laden was at the compound, it appears that the CIA did not manage to obtain any useful DNA.

On May 1, the White House took a gamble. A SEAL team went into the compound, found Bin Laden and shot him in the head.

(Source: NY Daily News)