Osama Bin laden lived in just two rooms for during the five years that he and his family occupied a multistory house in the Pakistan cantonment of Abbottabad.
Bin Laden’s wives, who were captured after a US Special Forces raid on May 1, reportedly gave that information to Pakistani intelligence services, ABC News said. A 79-member US Navy SEAL team killed Bin Laden.
Pakistani intelligence officials have questioned Yemen-born Amal Ahmed al-Sadah and two other wives of Mr. Bin Laden. They were not named in the news reports.
Reports had suggested that Ms. Sadah, 29, was shot in the calf after rushing at US Navy Seals who broke into the room where her husband was taking shelter.
She told Pakistani intelligence that she had stayed with Mr. Bin Laden on the upper floors of the compound since moving there in 2006, according to an Associated Press report.
Ms. Sadah said that since he lived in the compound, Bin Laden never left two rooms, one of them the bedroom where he was shot dead, ABC News reported.
“He used two rooms on one of the floors,” ABC quoted Asad Munir, a former officer from Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency, as saying. “He never went anywhere.”
Mr. Munir told ABC News that Mr. Bin Laden’s wives had been taken to Pakistan’s capital Islamabad for questioning. He described the procedure of questioning saying, “We give them a questionnaire with 20 questions. We change the order of questions every three or four days.” Interrogators then look for discrepancies in the answers: “For telling lies you have to have very good memory. There’s a way to find out. No one will tell you the first day the correct answer.”
Pakistani officials said the US intelligence was not given access to the wives of Bin Laden because of tensions following US announcement that it had carried out the raid without the prior knowledge of Pakistan.
The Al-Qaeda leader was previously thought to be hiding somewhere in Tora Bora, a geographic cave complex situated in the White Mountains in east Afghanistan. Many were surprised to know that the most wanted man in the world was living in a large compound of an upper class and affluent Pakistani community in the city of Abbottabad. The national military academy was just a few yards down the road from Bin Laden’s home.
–Agencies