Revealed: The ever-so-ordinary house where Osama bin Laden 'lived for a year before he moved to mansion where he was killed'
The residence in the frontier town of Haripur was one of five safe houses used by the slain Al Qaeda leader while on the run in Pakistan, according to information revealed by his youngest wife, who has been detained.
Retired Pakistani Brigadier Shaukat Qadir, who has spent the last eight months tracking bin Laden's movements, said he was taken to the Haripur house last November by intelligence agents who located it from a description they got from Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada.
Al-Sada, a 30-year-old Yemeni, has been in Pakistani custody since May 2, when U.S. Navy SEALs overran the Abbottabad compound, killing bin Laden and four other people inside. Since then, Pakistan's intelligence agency, known as the ISI, has been trying to uncover the trail that brought him to Abbottabad villa in the summer of 2005.
The best information appears to have come from al-Sada, who was believed to be his favorite and who traveled with bin Laden since his escape from Afghanistan's eastern Tora Bora mountain range in 2001.
Qadir, a 35-year-old army veteran who is now a security consultant, was given rare access to transcripts of Pakistani intelligence's interrogation of al-Sada and access to other documents on bin Laden's movements. He provided the details in a recent interview.
The details of bin Laden's life as a fugitive - which were first published by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn - raise fresh questions over how he was able to remain undetected for so long in Pakistan after the September 11 attacks, despite being the subject of a massive international manhunt.
Yet a senior U.S. official, who is familiar with the contents recovered from bin Laden's Abbottabad house, said there was no evidence that Pakistani officials were aware of the Al Qaeda figurehead's presence.
'There was no smoking gun. We didn't find anything,' he said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak about the contents of the Abbottabad compound.
According to the interrogation report, bin Laden lived in five safehouses and fathered four children - the two youngest born in a public hospital in Abbotabad. But investigators have only located the houses in Abbottabad and Haripur.
Al-Sada's descriptions of the homes have been vague and the Haripur house was found only after a series of hits and misses.
She knew only that it was located on the edge of Haripur, it was two stories tall and it had a basement. It apparently was used by bin Laden while he waited for construction crews to finish his new home in Abbottabad, a garrison town just 20 miles away.
Investigators scoured the area looking for properties until they found the Haripur house in Naseem Town, a chaotic suburb where relatively affluent houses bump up against sun-baked mud huts that belong to nomadic Afghans.
Like the CIA, the Pakistani agency also tracked the movements of bin Laden's Pakistani courier, who used the pseudonym Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, and his brother. The two were ethnic Pashtuns from Pakistan's Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province on the border with Afghanistan. They acted as bin Laden's front men.
The ISI discovered that the Haripur house, like the land on which bin Laden's Abbottabad villa was built, was rented by two Pashtun brothers claiming to be from Charsadda, a Pashtun-dominated town about 80 miles away.
Qadir said ISI agents had taken him to the Haripur house last November. The estate agent who rented the four-bedroom house to the two brothers, Salim and Javed Khan from Charsadda, for $150 a month, has been named as Pir Mohammed.
At the time Mohammed ran a small estate firm called Mashallah. He said his meeting with the brothers was random.
'They must have seen my sign and come in,' Mohammed said, adding that he had met the brothers only three times - when they signed the contract, when they moved into the house and when they moved out 11 months later.
Two months ago several ISI agents took all the records of the house and its tenants since its construction in 2000, said Qasi Anis Rahman, the brother of the widow who owns the house.
'All they said was that it was for "security purposes",' said Rahman.
Al-Sada is currently in Pakistani custody, along with bin Laden's two other wives and several children.
They were arrested after the raid. The U.S. Navy SEALs shot al-Sada in the leg during the operation.
Mohammed Amir Khalil, a lawyer for the three widows, said the women would be formally charged for illegally staying in Pakistan on April 2. That charge carries a maximum five-year prison sentence.
Culled from DAILY MAIL
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