Pakistan army soldiers rest near the house where it is believed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden lived in Abbottabad, Pakistan on Monday, May 2, 2011. Bin Laden, the glowering mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed thousands of people, was slain in his hideout in Pakistan early Monday in a firefight with U.S. forces, ending a manhunt that spanned a frustrating decade. (AP /Anjum Naveed)
The Osama Bin Laden compound was registered under a bogus name.
The Pakistani Nation reported:
National identity card of the owner of the house where Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden was hiding was found bogus.
According to a private television channel, the identity card bearing the name of the house owner as Arshad s/o Naqeeb, said to be a resident of Tangi Fas area of Charsadda.
According to local NADRA office, the card has been bogus. The residents of Tangi area also said that no man with such name was residing in the area.
The walls were topped with barbed wire.
GEO TV reported:
Bin Laden was finally found — more than 9-1/2 years after the 2001 attacks on the United States — after authorities discovered in August 2010 that the courier lived with his brother and their families in an unusual and extremely high-security building, officials said.
“When we saw the compound where the brothers lived, we were shocked by what we saw: an extraordinarily unique compound,” a senior administration official said.
“The bottom line of our collection and our analysis was that we had high confidence that the compound harbored a high-value terrorist target. The experts who worked this issue for years assessed that there was a strong probability that the terrorist who was hiding there was Osama bin Laden,” another administration official said.
The home is in Abbotabad, a town about 35 miles (60 km) north of Islamabad.
The building, about eight times the size of other nearby houses, sat on a large plot of land that was relatively secluded when it was built in 2005. When it was constructed, it was on the outskirts of Abbotabad’s center, at the end of a dirt road, but some other homes have been built nearby in the six years since it went up, officials said.
WALLS TOPPED WITH BARBED WIRE
Intense security measures included 12- to 18-foot (3.6 meters to 5.5 meters) outer walls topped with barbed wire and internal walls that sectioned off different parts of the compound, officials said. Two security gates restricted access, and residents burned their trash, rather than leaving it for collection as did their neighbors, officials said.
Few windows of the three-story home faced the outside of the compound, and a terrace had a seven-foot (2.1 meter) privacy wall, officials said.
“It is also noteworthy that the property is valued at approximately $1 million but has no telephone or Internet service connected to it,” an administration official said. “The brothers had no explainable source of wealth.”
U.S. analysts realized that a third family lived there in addition to the two brothers, and the age and makeup of the third family matched those of the relatives — including his youngest wife — they believed would be living with bin Laden.
UPDATE: Osama’s compound was a former Pakistani security forces safe house.
