A report in the New York Times newspaper says Afghan officials gave $1 million from a secret CIA fund and $4 million from other countries to pay for a hostage to be freed in 2010.
The report says the payments were just part of a long list of examples of how poor oversight and loose financial controls led the United States to inadvertently finance the militants it is fighting.
Documentation of the ransom payment was included in correspondence between Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda’s general manager Atiyah Abd al-Rahman that has been submitted as evidence by federal prosecutors at the Brooklyn trial of Abid Naseer.
Naseer is a Pakistani Al-Qaeda operative who was convicted this month of supporting terrorism and conspiring in to bomb a British shopping center.
The letters were unearthed from computer files and documents seized by U.S. Navy Seals during the 2001 raid that killed Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
It had been classified information until it was introduced as trial evidence.