Daughter saw Osama bin Laden killed: Official

Islamabad – A young daughter of Osama bin Laden, now in custody with a Yemeni wife of the al Qaeda leader, saw her father shot dead, a Pakistani intelligence official said yesterday.

The official from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency said up to 12 women and children who survived the US raid on their villa were now in custody.The child, reported to be 12-years-old, ‘was the one who confirmed to us that Osama was dead and shot and taken away’, said the official.Four bodies were retrieved from the daring covert attack, including one of bin Laden’s sons, said the official, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity.Up to three women and nine children, including the young Yemeni woman who was shot in the leg and a daughter of the Saudi-born mastermind, are in detention, he said.Intelligence officials said the group were being interrogated.The Pakistani government said on Tuesday that family members of bin Laden were ‘being looked after’ and would be handed over to their countries of origin.The ISI official said Pakistan had shared intelligence with US agents as early as 2009, which ultimately led to the compound where bin Laden was killed early on Monday.Islamabad is under pressure to explain how al Qaeda’s top man had been able to live undetected for months right by the country’s military training centre, before he was killed by US Navy Seals.Pakistan’s top foreign ministry official, Salman Bashir, earlier told the BBC: ‘We had indicated this compound as far back as 2009 as a possible place’.The ISI official said its agents had raided the house in 2003 in a failed operation to find al-Qaeda number three Abu Faraj al-Libbi, before the compound ‘slipped from our radar’.Meanwhile, an AP report said a doctor who sold a piece of the land where Osama bin Laden’s final hideout was built said the buyer, a Pakistani who apparently sheltered the al Qaeda chief, was a ‘modest, humble’ man who did not seem to be a militant.As Pakistan sought to counter suspicions it had been harbouring bin Laden, details emerged yesterday about the small group of men who looked after the al Qaeda chief in this northwestern town before he was killed by US commandos.Chief among them was a man known as Arshad Khan, who neighbours said was one of two Pakistani men living in the house. Property records obtained by The Associated Press show Mohammad Arshad bought adjoining plots in four stages between 2004 and 2005 for $48,000. The two appear to be the same person, and the names may be fake.The doctor, Qazi Mahfooz Ul Haq, said he sold a plot of land to Arshad in 2005. He said the buyer was a sturdily built man who had a tuft of hair under his lower lip. He spoke with an accent that sounded like it was from Waziristan, a tribal region close to Afghanistan that is home to many al-Qaida operatives.’He was a very simple, modest, humble type of man’ who was ‘very interested’ in buying the land for ‘an uncle,’ the doctor said.Arshad may have been one of the five people killed in the raid including bin Laden and one of his sons. US officials have said bin Laden’s most trusted courier, and the courier’s wife and brother also died.It is still unclear what the connection was between Arshad and the courier, who eventually led the US to bin Laden, or if they were in fact the same person.US officials have identified the courier as Sheikh Abu Ahmed, a Pakistani man born in Kuwait who went by the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. They obtained his name from detainees held in secret CIA prison sites in Eastern Europe and vetted it with top al Qaeda operatives like September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.The courier was so important to al Qaeda that he was tapped by Mohammed to shepherd the man who was to have been the 20th hijacker through computer training needed for the September 11 attacks, according to newly released documents from Guantanamo Bay interrogations.The courier allegedly trained Maad al-Qahtani at an internet cafe in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi in July 2001 so that he could communicate by email with Mohammed Atta, the September 11 financier and one of the 19 hijackers, who was already in the United States.But al-Qahtani proved to be a poor student and was ultimately denied entry to the US when he raised suspicion among immigration officials.Al-Kuwaiti inadvertently led intelligence officials to bin Laden when he used a telephone last year to talk with someone the US had wiretapped. The CIA then tracked al-Kuwaiti back to the walled compound in Abbottabad.Bin Laden was living in a large house not far from a military academy in Abbottabad, an army town that is just two hours drive from the capital. That he lived there for up to six years undetected has reignited long-standing suspicions that the country, nominally a US ally, is playing a double game.Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said anyone who claimed his country hid bin Laden was ‘colour blind.’During a visit to Paris, Gilani said that Pakistan shared intelligence with numerous countries in the fight against terrorism and had ‘excellent cooperation’ with the United States. He said that ‘if we have failed it means everybody failed,’ and an investigation would be ordered.Meanwhile, Indonesia said its most wanted terrorist suspect was in Abbottabad to meet Osama bin Laden when he was arrested there early this year. – Nampa-AP-AFP

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