Ornate, but not lavish: Another bin Laden home located in Pakistan
The emerging details of Osama bin Laden's life on the run raise fresh questions over how the Al Qaeda chief was able to evade detection for years in Pakistan.
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According to the interrogation report, bin Laden lived in five safe houses 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.
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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 and it had a basement. It apparently was used by bin Laden while he waited for construction crews to finish his new home 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 were 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.
The AP located the Haripur house that Qadir said ISI agents had taken him to last November and found the real estate broker, Pir Mohammed, who rented the four-bedroom house to the two brothers, Salim and Javed Khan from Charsadda, for $150 a month.
At the time Pir Mohammed ran a small real 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 US 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.
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