By the time Pakistani soldiers temporarily lifted the cordon around Osama bin Laden’s house in the garrison town of Abbottabad on Tuesday, 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-story building, taking away computer hard disks and a trove of documents — as well as bin Laden’s bloodied body, which was later buried at sea.
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, but it was impossible to erase every trace of the drama that ended the manhunt.
Photo: Reuters
Beyond the gates, children in flip-flops and salwar kameez fished chunks of blackened helicopter debris from the surrounding fields, flung there after a US helicopter that failed to take off was blown up by its own soldiers.
One boy produced a jagged, soot-encrusted chunk of metal, perhaps part of an exhaust, from a drain.
“This is silver,” 12-year-old Yasser said.
A nervous-looking intelligence official, loitering nearby, grabbed the child by the hand and led him away.
Fascination with the raid was not confined to Abbottabad. In Washington, fresh details were being revealed by the White House, some of 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 said that he had put up a fight and shot at the Seal 6 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. 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 US$1 million mansion described by officials. The walls were high, certainly, but not unusually so for northwestern Pakistan, where privacy is jealously guarded. The paint was peeling and there was no air conditioning.
However, it was the only house in the neighborhood with barbed wire and surveillance cameras, and it towered over its only neighbor, 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.
“I’ve no idea where he is,” he said. “The soldiers won’t allow us to leave, not even to fetch water.”
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,” Abid Khan said.
The house, it turned out, had been on the radar of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for more than eight years. Construction started around 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.
Around 2005, bin Laden moved in, according to US officials — around the time of the devastating Kashmir earthquake that killed 73,000 people in October of that year. As the wounded flooded into Abbottabad’s military hospital a little more than 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.
There had been great speculation about his whereabouts. Across the border in Afghanistan, US soldiers distributed matchboxes with bin Laden’s picture and details of a US$25 million bounty.
In Pakistan, the US embassy paid for expensive TV ads appealing for information.
“Who can stop these terrorists? Only you,” a voice said as images of bin Laden and 13 henchmen flashed across the screen.
Then-Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf insisted the US was wrong.
His security forces had “broken the vertical and horizontal command and communication links of al-Qaeda” in Pakistan, he boasted.
“There are a lot of people who say that Osama bin Laden is here in Pakistan,” he said. “Please come and show us where.”
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-Qaeda militant picked up in Iraq: Sheikh Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. US officials described him as a Pakistani brought up in Kuwait.
To the locals, however, he was simply a Pashtun businessman with an identity card issued in Charsadda, north of Peshawar. He and his brother seemed to be known by several names: Arshad and Tariq Khan, but also Rasheed, Ahmed and Nadeem. The gas bill was in the name of the elder brother, Arshad Khan, presumed to be the “courier” sought by the US. Oddly, the house had four separate gas connections. They kept largely to themselves, coming and going in a small white Suzuki van and a red jeep, but they joined in with neighborhood rituals, condoling the bereaved, celebrating weddings and births. It may have been a necessary part of the cover story; to have done otherwise could have aroused greater suspicion.
“They weren’t chatty,” said Rasheed, a 32-year-old local shopkeeper, lounging behind his counter.
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.
However, he had noticed something odd. He had worked on the house as a laborer when it was being built, and had wondered why the brothers insisted that the walls should be 1m thick.
In the end, the two brothers were bin Laden’s downfall. The CIA learned of Arshad Khan’s identity four years ago, and after a two-year hunt, learned that he lived in the Abbottabad area.
Then, in August last year, 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 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 President Barack Obama insists the Navy Seals would have detained him if they could, but it is hard to imagine US officials would have relished either a trial or the spectacle of the al-Qaeda leader being held in Guantanamo Bay.
Bin Laden’s erstwhile neighbors, 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 neighbor they never knew. A few displayed pro-Osama bravado.
“I would have opened fire on the Americans myself if I had to defend him,” one man said.
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