The sprawling compound where Osama bin Laden sheltered before his death stood out in its middle-class neighborhood on the edges of scenic Abbottabad, home to a large Pakistani military base and a military academy.
The compound is about eight times the size of most homes in the area and was surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire. Nearby residents noticed that few people ever ventured out of the house.
Still, nearby residents in the area called Bilal Town, where many retired and serving military officials live, said they were not suspicious of the house’s occupants and never suspected a high-level militant leader might be living there.
Photo: Reuters
Some said they assumed the occupants mainly kept to themselves because they were religious, although even in most devout Pakistani families men regularly socialize with other men.
Jibran Khan, 23, who lives near Bilal Town, said he had seen the huge house several times and never imagined that bin Laden would be hiding there, assuming that a wealthy person had simply decided to settle on the large piece of property with a view of the hills that surround the town.
Khan said he had never met the people who lived in the house, but knew others who did.
“A friend told me that some tall, bearded men lived in the house, who said they had come to Abbottabad from Peshawar some years ago due to some enmity,” Khan said.
He said his friend, who ran into the men at a local bakery, told him they appeared to be Pakistanis and were always very courteous.
On Monday, the Pakistan army put up barricades to block access to all roads and alleys that lead to the house and barred journalists from going near it.
Residents outside the police cordon said they knew something unusual was happening when they heard helicopters hovering overhead at about midnight on Sunday and heard gunfire. Several said they spotted three helicopters. After one of the aircraft crashed, they said, another flew close to the hideout just before a huge blast rattled the neighborhood.
A doctor, who lives about 3km from the compound said that people in the town were stunned by the news — and disturbed by the continuing violence in the country.
Much of the picturesque town was built by the British as a resort and it remains a popular destination for tourists looking for a stop on the way north from Islamabad to go hiking in the mountains. The doctor, who like other members of his family spoke on condition of anonymity, likened his own home to the Little House on the Prairie and said many residents of the town were well-educated.
His teenage daughter seemed somewhat nonplussed.
“This is the last place we thought he’d be hiding,” she said. “It’s Abbottabad, for crying out loud. Nothing ever really happens here.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS