Dr Afridi was the top medic in Khyber tribal district and as head of health services had overseen a number of US-funded vaccination programmes.
As a government employee, he set up a similar hepatitis B vaccination programme, including in the garrison town of Abbottabad, where it turned out Bin Laden was living right under the noses of the military.
The US intelligence plan was to obtain a blood sample from one of the children living in the Abbottabad compound, so that DNA tests could determine whether or not they were relatives of Bin Laden.