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Pakistan: Leaked report shows Bin Laden’s ‘hidden life’
(Al Jazeera) July 7, 2013 – The Abbottabad Commission was charged with establishing if the failures of the Pakistani government and military were due to incompetence or complicity, and was given overarching investigative powers.
The Commission’s 336-page report is scathing, holding both the government and the military responsible for “gross incompetence” leading to “collective failures” that allowed both Bin Laden to escape detection, and the United States to perpetrate “an act of war”.
Moreover, through the testimony of Bin Laden’s family members, intelligence officials and the wife of one of his couriers, the Commission is able to piece together a richly detailed image of Bin Laden’s life on the run from authorities, including details on the secluded life that he and his family led in Abbottabad and elsewhere.
It found that Bin Laden entered Pakistan in mid-2002, after narrowly escaping capture in the Battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2001. Intelligence officials say he stayed briefly in the South Waziristan and Bajaur tribal areas of Pakistan, before moving to the northern Swat Valley to stay with his guards, Ibrahim and Abrar al-Kuwaiti, for several months.
While in Swat, Bin Laden reportedly met with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks against the United States, in early 2003. A month later, Mohammad is captured in Rawalpindi in a joint US-Pakistani operation, and Bin Laden flees Swat.
Bin Laden turned up next in the town of Haripur, in northern Pakistan, where he stayed in a rented house with two of his wives and several of his children and grandchildren for two years, until 2005.
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In August that year, they all move to a custom-built compound in Abbottabad, a military garrison town located about 85km away from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. He stayed there for six years, until he is killed in the US operation in May 2011.
Findings of Abbottabad Commission: How US reached Osama
ISLAMABAD (Dawn.com) – Its findings reveal that the arrest of Khalid Bin Attash (an Al Qaeda member who was involved in the pre-9/11 attacks such as on USS Cole and the embassies in Africa) in `2002′ from Karachi led to the first major breakthrough – he is the one who identified Abu Ahmed Ali Kuwaiti (the Kuwaiti born Pakistani who was OBL’s right hand man and courier and the man who led the Americans to Bin Laden.
After this information came to light, the Kuwaiti intelligence service was contacted but it could not provide any details about the man.
During the search for this man, CIA provided four phone numbers between “2009 to Nov 2010” to Pakistan but without any details as to who they were searching for. Dawn has learnt that these numbers “most of the time remained off” but while the ISI kept the CIA in the loop it did so “without knowing the context and to whom these numbers belonged”.
Now in retrospect, the commission report confirms Attash’s disclosure – Kuwaiti was OBL’s right hand man. According to what the commission has discovered, he was with OBL’s family in Karachi when it moved to the port city in Oct/Nov 2001.
In 2002, when the family (including OBL’s wives) moved to Peshawar, Kuwaiti was with them and this is where OBL joined them – in mid-2002.
