Fresh details of bin Laden’s death heightens fascination on the scene and further afield
BY THE time Pakistani soldiers lifted the cordon around Osama bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad yesterday, triggering a media stampede, the most obvious traces of its infamous resident had been effaced.
The US soldiers who had swept in aboard four helicopters on Sunday night had scoured the three-storey building, taking away computer hard disks and a trove of documents – as well as bin Laden’s bloodied body.
The following day, Pakistani intelligence – angered at not having been informed of the raid, and embarrassed that it took place under their noses – made a second sweep. Tractors carted away furniture and other belongings.
Beyond the gates, children in flip-flops fished chunks of debris from the surrounding fields, flung there after a US helicopter that failed to take off was blown up by its own soldiers.
Fascination with the raid was not confined to Abbottabad. In Washington, fresh details were being revealed by the White House, some which contradicted the earlier version of events surrounding the killing of their most wanted man.
In the immediate hours after bin Laden’s death, US officials had briefed that he had put up a fight and shot at the navy seal team that had stormed the second and third floors of his hideout. Other details suggested he had used one of his wives as a human shield.
The White House confirmed yesterday that neither was true. Bin Laden was unarmed, was shot in the head and chest, and his wife had been wounded in the leg while rushing towards the special forces before he was killed.
The photographs of his body, the spokesman said, were probably too gruesome to be released.
Another narrative to change somewhat concerned the property itself. Up close, bin Laden’s house, a tall, unlovely piece of architecture, was not quite the million-dollar mansion described by officials. The walls were high, certainly, but not unusually so for north-western Pakistan, where privacy is jealously guarded. The paint was peeling, there was no air conditioning.
But it was the only house in the neighbourhood with barbed wire and surveillance cameras. And it towered over its only neighbour, a small, ramshackle dwelling made of rough bricks with plastic sheeting for windows. The people inside were scared and apprehensive.
Zain Muhammad, an elderly man perched on a rope bed on the porch, said Pakistani soldiers had come in the night and taken away his son, Shamraiz.
The residents had had their suspicions about the house across the street, they said: the thick walls and barbed wire, and the two secretive brothers who owned it, described as ethnic Pashtuns.
“They told us they had to protect themselves because they had enemies back in their home village. They said they had to screen off the house to protect their women. A lot of us thought they were smugglers,” said Abid Khan.
The house, it turned out, had been on the radar of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for more that eight years. Construction started about 2001. Two years later, ISI agents raided it in search of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a senior bin Laden lieutenant, but left empty-handed, an ISI official said yesterday.
About 2005, bin Laden moved in, according to US officials – around about the time of the Kashmir earthquake that killed 73,000 people in October of that year. As the wounded flooded into Abbottabad’s military hospital just over 1km away – so many that doctors set up a tent on the main lawn – the Saudi fugitive and his clan were settling into this house down the road.
In Abbottabad, the two Pashtun brothers had finally completed their house, about 1km from the Pakistan Military Academy where Musharraf himself had been trained. One of them was bin Laden’s courier, the man trusted to take his messages to the outside world. CIA officials learned his nom de guerre from an al-Qaida militant picked up in Iraq: Sheikh Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. US officials described him a Pakistani brought up in Kuwait.
To the locals, he was simply a Pashtun businessman with an identity card issued in Charsadda, north of Peshawar. “They weren’t chatty,” said Rasheed, a 32-year-old local shopkeeper. He sold the brothers salty biscuits and chewy toffees when they visited with their seven children.
He refused to believe they had any links to Kuwait. “We absolutely believed they were Pashtuns,” he said.
But he had noticed something odd. He had worked on the house as a labourer and had wondered why the brothers insisted that the walls should be a metre thick.
In the end, the two brothers were bin Laden’s downfall. The CIA learned of the Arshad Khan’s identity four years ago, and after a two-year hunt learned that he lived in the Abbottabad area.
Then, last August, a Pakistani working for the CIA followed one of the brothers as he drove his Suzuki van from Peshawar, leading them to the house. In February, the CIA became convinced bin Laden was inside, leading to last Sunday’s raid.
The two brothers were killed, according to the CIA, along with bin Laden and one of his sons, thought to be Khalid.
Many details, however, remain blurred. US officials amended their initial version to reveal that a woman who was killed during the raid on the compound was not bin Laden’s wife.
It is also not clear how bin Laden, who was cornered in a third-floor room now marked by a shattered windowpane, resisted as the US soldiers barged in.
Bin Laden’s erstwhile neighbours, now in the gaze of the world’s media, congregated outside his house yesterday. Some seemed angry, others bemused. One bearded man scolded his friends for speaking to the foreign press; others seemed to relish the attention, presenting themselves for detailed interviews about the neighbour they never knew.
A few displayed pro-Osama bravado. “I would have opened fire on the Americans myself if I had to defend him!” declared one man.
– (Copyright: Guardian News Media 2011)