Final hiding places … the house in which Osama bin Laden lived in Abbottabad was demolished last month. Photo: AP
Osama bin Laden spent nine years on the run in Pakistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks, and in that time he moved between five safe houses and fathered four children, at least two of whom were born in a government hospital, his youngest wife has told Pakistani investigators.
The testimony of Amal Ahmed Abdul Fatah, bin Laden's 30-year-old wife, offers the most detailed account yet of life on the run for the bin Laden family in the years preceding the US commando raid in Abbottabad last May that killed the 54-year-old al-Qaeda leader.
Her account in a police report dated January 19 contains manifest flaws: Fatah's words are paraphrased by a police officer, and there is noticeably little detail about the Pakistanis who helped her husband evade his US pursuers. Nevertheless, it raises more questions about how the world's most-wanted man managed to shunt his family between cities spanning Pakistan, apparently undetected and unmolested by the otherwise formidable security services.
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A Pakistani TV reporter prepares to broadcast from a village where bin Laden's wife said they lived for 2½ years south of Abbottabad. Photo: New York Times
Bin Laden's three widows are of great interest because they hold the answers to some of the questions that frustrated Western intelligence in the years after September 11. They are under house arrest in Islamabad, and their lawyer expects them and two adult children - bin Laden's daughters Maryam, 21, and Sumaya, 20 - to be charged with breaking Pakistani immigration laws on April 2. A conviction carries a possible five-year jail sentence.
The wives have co-operated with the authorities to varying degrees. Investigators say the older women, named in court documents as Kharia Hussain Sabir and Siham Sharif, both citizens of Saudi Arabia, have largely refused to co-operate with investigators. But Fatah, who was wounded in the raid in which her husband died, has spoken out.
The report, by a joint investigative panel made up of civilian and military officials, was first mentioned in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn on Thursday. The New York Times later obtained a copy of the filing.
Osama bin Laden. Photo: AFP
In Washington, US officials said that while they could not confirm every detail of the report, it appeared generally consistent with what is known and believed about bin Laden's movements.
In the report's account, Fatah said she agreed to marry bin Laden in 2000 because ''she had a desire of marrying a mujahid''. She flew into Karachi in July that year and, months later, crossed into Afghanistan to join bin Laden and two other wives at his base on a farm outside Kandahar.
The September 11 attacks caused the bin Laden family to ''scatter,'' the report said.
She returned to Karachi with her newborn daughter, Safia, where they stayed for about nine months. They changed houses up to seven times under arrangements brokered by ''some Pakistani family'' and bin Laden's elder son, Saad.
Other senior al-Qaeda figures were also in Karachi, a sprawling city of about 18 million people. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the September 11 terrorist attacks, claims to have personally killed The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl there during this period; Pearl was captured at a house in Rawalpindi in March 2003. Fatah said she left Karachi in the second half of 2002 for Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where she was reunited with her husband. The US pursuit of bin Laden was running high. Al-Qaeda operatives had attacked an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya and nightclubs in Indonesia, and with CIA intelligence resources not yet diverted to Iraq, the search was firmly focused on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.
Bin Laden, according to his wife, took his family deep into rural mountain areas of northwest Pakistan - but not into the tribal belt where much Western attention was focused.
At first they stayed in Shangla District in Swat, a picturesque area about 130 kilometres north-west of the capital, Islamabad, where they stayed in two different houses for between eight and nine months.
Then in 2003 they moved to Haripur, a small town even closer to Islamabad, where they stayed in a rented house for two years. Here, Fatah gave birth to a girl, Aasia, in 2003 and a boy, Ibrahim, in 2004 - both of whom were delivered in a local government hospital. The police report says that Fatah ''stayed in hospital for a very short time of about 2-3 hours'' on each occasion. A separate document says she gave fake identity papers to hospital staff.
Finally, in mid-2005, according to Fatah, bin Laden and his family moved to Abbottabad, 32 kilometres east of Haripur, where she gave birth to another two children: Zainab in 2006 and Hussain in 2008.
Fatah told investigators that the houses in Swat, Haripur and Abbottabad were organised by their Pashtun hosts, identified as two brothers named Ibrahim and Abrar, whose families stayed with them throughout.
Ibrahim is believed to refer to Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a Pakistani-born Pashtun who grew up in Kuwait and who was known to US intelligence as ''the courier,'' because he carried the al-Qaeda leader's messages.
When US Navy SEAL commandos stormed the Abbottabad house last May, they killed bin Laden, and shot Fatah, who was in the same room, in the leg. She survived but four others were killed in the raid: the courier, his wife Bushra, his brother, Abrar, and bin Laden's 20-year-old son Khalil.
On Tuesday a cousin of Fatah's in Yemen said she was being held in a basement. ''She limps from a bullet wound in her knee and she's suffering from psychological trauma and very low blood pressure,'' Hameed al-Sadeh told Reuters.
Fatah's account, if proven, suggests that US military forces came tantalisingly close to bin Laden in late 2005. In October of that year, a powerful earthquake struck north-western Pakistan, killing at least 73,000 people. For weeks afterwards, US Chinook helicopters, diverted from Afghanistan and carrying relief supplies, passed overhead on their way into the quake zone. Meanwhile, Pakistan's military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, a close ally of the Bush administration, repeatedly claimed that bin Laden was sheltering across the border in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani decision to prosecute the three wives and two children goes against an earlier recommendation from the police that they should be deported to Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Pakistani analysts said that suggested that Pakistani intelligence may have hidden reasons for detaining the family.
''I think the government wants to hang onto them through a trial procedure so that the investigation can be completed,'' said Dr Riffat Hussain, a defence analyst. ''And I think the Americans are quite keen to have access to Osama's wives too.''
The New York Times