Shakeel Afridi made international headlines when he was imprisoned for his role in an elaborate plot, which included conducting a fake vaccine drive in the neighbourhood where bin Laden was hiding, to unveil the terror mastermind's hideout.

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has previously described Afridi's jailing as ''unjust and unwarranted''.

However, high commissioner for Pakistan Abdul Malik Abdullah has defended the move.

In an interview with the Sunday Canberra Times, Mr Abdullah said that Pakistan had sacrificed billions of dollars and thousands of lives in the war on terror and the doctor had a duty to inform the Pakistani authorities of his find, rather than a foreign nation.

Mr Abdullah said Pakistan's intelligence agency - the ISI - had provided the CIA with a phone number for bin Laden's main co-ordinator in November 2010 and asked for help, which never came.

''We did not have the technology to do anything with the phone number so we shared it with the CIA and asked them to check it and they never came back to us,'' he said. Mr Abdullah said the capture of arguably the world's most wanted man should have been done by the Pakistani authorities.

''Pakistan is taking flak - people are accusing us of knowing his whereabouts but had Afridi given this type of information to Pakistan, Pakistan would have taken this action itself and would have been saved from this embarrassment,'' he said. ''If somebody is saying 'you should free him and take the blame for Osama bin Laden living in Pakistan and providing refuge and sanctuary' I think that is totally unfair.

''If you are a government official and you are [working for] a foreign government - albeit a friendly foreign government - is that fair?''

Mr Abdullah said the US had imprisoned one of its own, naval intelligence and security specialist Jonathan Pollard, for life in the 1980s under similar circumstances.

''He passed some information to Mossad - the Israel intelligence agency which is one of the closest allies of the US and of the CIA,'' he said. ''And yet he was given a life sentence. [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu threatened not to continue with the peace plan unless Pollard was released. The US said 'no'.

''Why are there these double standards? Also, our doctor has been convicted but he can still appeal.''

The US embassy in Canberra declined to comment on Mr Abdullah's remarks and the US Department of State in Washington DC did not respond to an inquiry.

Mr Abdullah said he did not believe that Pakistan was being properly acknowledged for its contributions to the war on terror.

''What ordinary Australians know is what's being told by the Western press and the Western press has a very clear bias,'' he said.