RAWALPINDI: Osama bin Laden spent his last weeks in a house divided, amid wives riven by suspicions. On the top floor, sharing his bedroom, was his youngest wife. The trouble came when his eldest wife moved into the bedroom on the floor below.
Others in the family, crammed into the three-storey villa compound where Bin Laden would eventually be killed in a May 2 US raid, were convinced that the eldest wife intended to betray the Al Qaeda leader.
The picture of Bin Laden’s life in the Abbottabad compound comes from Brig Shaukat Qadir, a retired army officer who spent months researching the events and says he was given rare access to transcripts of Pakistani intelligence’s interrogation of Bin Laden’s youngest wife, who was detained in the raid.
Brig Qadir was also given rare entry into the villa, which was sealed after the raid and demolished last month. Pictures he took, which he allowed The Associated Press to see, showed the villa’s main staircase, splattered with blood. Other pictures show windows protected by iron grills and the 20-foot high walls around the villa.
Brig Qadir’s research gives one of the most extensive descriptions of the arrangements in Bin Laden’s hideout when US SEAL commandos stormed in, killing him and four others. His account is based on accounts by an official of Inter-Services Intelligence agency who escorted him on a tour of the villa, the interrogation transcription he was allowed to read, and interviews with other ISI officials and Al Qaeda-linked militants and tribesmen in the Afghan-Pakistan border region.
The compound where Bin Laden lived since mid-2005 was a crowded place, with 28 residents, including Bin Laden, his three wives, eight of his children and five of his grandchildren.
Bin Laden lived and died on the third floor. One room he shared with his youngest wife, Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada, a Yemeni who was 19 when she married the Al Qaeda leader in 1999. Another wife, Siham Saber, lived in another room on the same floor that also served as a computer room, Brig Qadir said.
The arrival of his eldest wife, Saudi-born Khairiah Saber, in early 2011 stirred up the household, Amal said in her ISI interrogation, according to Brig Qadir.
There was already bad blood between Khairiah, who married Bin Laden in the late 1980s, and Amal because of Bin Laden’s favouritism for the younger Yemeni woman, Brig Qadir said he was told by tribal leaders who knew the family.—AP
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