Bin Laden moved between 5 safe houses in Pakistan

NY Times:

 Osama bin Laden spent nine years on the run in Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, during which time he moved among 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 Ahmad Abdul Fateh, 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 American commando raid in May 2011 that killed the leader of Al Qaeda at the age of 54.

Her account is contained in a police report dated Jan. 19 that, as an account of that frantic period, contains manifest flaws: Ms. Fateh’s words are paraphrased by a police officer, and there is noticeably little detail about the Pakistanis who helped her husband evade his American pursuers. Nevertheless, it raises more questions about how the world’s most wanted man managed to shunt his family between cities that span the breadth of Pakistan, apparently undetected and unmolested by the otherwise formidable security services.

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 2001. They are currently under house arrest in Islamabad, and their lawyer says he expects them and two adult children — Bin Laden’s daughters Maryam, 21, and Sumaya, 20 — to be charged on Monday with breaking Pakistani immigration laws, which carries a possible five-year jail sentence.

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The Sept. 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 Qaeda figures were also in Karachi, a sprawling city of up to 18 million people. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, claims to have personally killed the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl there during this period; he was captured at a house in Rawalpindi in March 2003.

Ms. Fateh 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 American pursuit of Bin Laden was running high: Qaeda operatives had attacked an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya and nightclubs in Indonesia, and with C.I.A. 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, notably, into the tribal belt where much Western attention was focused. First they stayed in the Shangla district in Swat, a picturesque area about 80 miles northwest of the capital, Islamabad, where they stayed in two different houses for eight to 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, Ms. Fateh 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 states that Ms. Fateh “stayed in hospital for a very short time of about 2-3 hours” on each occasion. A separate document states that she gave fake identity papers to hospital staff.

Finally, in mid-2005, according to Ms. Fateh, Bin Laden and his family moved to Abbottabad, 20 miles east of Haripur, where she gave birth to another two children: Zainab in 2006 and Hussain in 2008.

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The US apparently came pretty close to bin Laden in 2005 when the military was helping Pakistan recover from a big earth quake.  The helicopters were apparently flying over where he was staying at the time.   Most of the time they were being helped by the same messengers whose activities led the US to their Abottabad location.  The story does not indicate how they were able to travel between locations.

There is no indication that they were helped by the Pakistan government, though many believe that to be the case.