Slain Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden had moved to Haripur, near Abbottabad, two years before he settled in the compound where he was eventually killed by US forces, officials said.
“Osama bin Laden moved to Abbottabad in 2005. Before that he was living in Haripur since 2003,” a Pakistani official said citing revelations by Amal Ahmed Abdelfatteh, Bin Laden’s Yemeni widow who was captured during the killing of the Al Qaeda chief.
The widow told investigators that Bin Laden lived with his family for nearly two-and-a-half years in the village of Chak Shah Mohammad, a little more than a mile southeast of the town of Haripur, on the main Abbottabad highway.
The widow said that contrary to the widely-held belief that the 54-year-old Al Qaeda leader required dialysis to treat his chronic kidney ailment, Bin Laden was hale and hearty.
For years since Osama bin Laden’s disappearance in 2001 from Tora Bora to escape a US-led dragnet in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province, both Pakistani and American officials believed he was hiding in the tribal region straddling the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
In May 2009, the police had arrested Abdullah Al-Masri from Malikyar village. Three days later, militants attacked the police guarding the house occupied by Al-Masri’s two wives and killed three policemen. One of the assailants, a Pakistani identified as Ijaz, son of Sadiq of Malikpura, Abbottabad, was also killed in the attack.
Interestingly enough, Umar Patek, an Indonesian involved in the Bali bombing of 2002, was also arrested from Malikpura, Abbottabad. Indonesian authorities now say Patek, arrested by a Pakistani intelligence agency in March, wanted to meet Bin Laden not far from where the Al Qaeda leader lived.
Amal, who according to these officials spent the last night with her husband and gave an account of what had transpired, told investigators that she had just moved with her husband to their bedroom and switched off the lights when they heard gunshots.
Before Bin Laden could reach out for his Kalashnikov, US Navy Seals burst in and shot at her husband, confirming again that he was unarmed. She was shot in the leg while trying to resist the Americans, she added.
The widow said Bin Laden, along with his children and grandchildren, had moved from Haripur to Abbottabad towards the end of 2005. The land in Bilal Town, said a government official, was bought by Arshad Khan on January 22, 2004 on the strength of a forged national identity card and a wrong address.