British journalist Piers Morgan delivered a scathing rebuttal on his show Piers Morgan Uncensored after a Pakistani panelist suggested that Osama bin Laden had been hiding from Pakistani intelligence, not with their knowledge.
During a heated segment discussing India-Pakistan tensions, Pakistani comedian and podcast host Shehzad Ghias Shaikh argued that the al-Qaeda leader was actively evading Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). His claim came despite the widely known fact that bin Laden was found living just a few hundred meters from a Pakistani military base in Abbottabad, where he was killed by US Navy SEALs in 2011.
Shaikh cited the Bin Laden Papers, declassified by U.S. intelligence and later analyzed in a book by terrorism expert Nelly Lahoud, as evidence that bin Laden feared Pakistani authorities. However, Indian panelists Barkha Dutt and Ranveer Allahbadia, also present on the show, responded with incredulous laughter and disbelief.
Piers Morgan promptly interrupted Shaikh:
“Hang on, hang on… what you’ve just said is utterly ludicrous,” said Morgan.
“Osama bin Laden was literally found living for years a few hundred yards from one of Pakistan’s main military bases. If your intelligence didn’t know he was there, that must be the worst intelligence failure in the history of military intelligence.”
He added sarcastically that Pakistani authorities could have located the world’s most wanted terrorist with “just a pair of binoculars.”
The exchange quickly went viral on social media, with many praising Morgan for calling out misinformation and highlighting Pakistan’s longstanding denials around the bin Laden episode.
