It’s been five years since
U.S. Navy Seals raided a three-story compound in Pakistan’s northwestern
garrison city of Abbotabad and killed Osama bin Laden, America’s most-wanted
terrorist. Residents of district in
which America’s most-wanted was killed still have trouble swallowing official
version of events
Disbelief
Journalists from the national and international media visit
the area every May 2, but seldom find locals who believe the official narrative
put out by Washington and Islamabad -- namely, that U.S. Navy Seals conducted
the deadly mission without the support or knowledge of Pakistan’s army.
Few local residents buy the story. Even those living next
to the compound do not believe that the world’s most wanted man had been their
neighbor for years.
Now there is nothing but a heap of
rubble and concrete slabs where the compound once stood.
Over the last five years, the
street -- now known as "Bin Laden Street" -- has seen the
construction of several new homes. The onion and potato fields that once
surrounded the compound have since been converted into modern farmland.
Most visitors have trouble
believing that this was the place that once dominated world headlines.
In the five years since the
dramatic events that took place here, there has been no dearth of conspiracy
theories regarding bin Laden’s death, the most common of which is that bin
Laden never lived here at all; that the entire episode was nothing more than
elaborate theater by Pakistan and the U.S.
"What Osama bin Laden? There
was never any such person here," Aftab Qureshi, a resident of Bilal Town,
the official name of the locality in which the compound is located, told
Anadolu Agency.
"If he was living here, then
what were all those intelligence officials -- whose offices surrounded the
so-called bin Laden compound -- doing all those years?" Qureshi asked.
He was referring to the local
offices of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Military Intelligence,
Intelligence Bureau and other intelligence agencies located within a
half-kilometer radius of the compound.
The location of the Pakistani
army’s Kakul training academy -- a mere 600 meters from the compound -- has
added to the chorus of conspiracy theories.
"If someone was standing on
the roof of the [bin Laden] compound, he could have easily hit the army chief,
who inspects an annual military parade," Mohamed Ashfaq, another Abbotabad
resident, said.
According to Ashfaq, each year
before the parade, army personnel collect the details of local residents -- and
their guests -- for security reasons.
"Can you believe a three-story
compound was built only a few hundred meters from such a highly sensitive
military installation [i.e., the Kakul academy] and the army didn’t care or
inquire about it?" he asked.
He went on to question how the
U.S., which claimed that top Pakistani officials had known of bin Laden’s
whereabouts, could -- if that that were the case -- still consider Islamabad
"a reliable ally in the war against terrorism".
"For most Pakistanis, this is
incomprehensible," he said.
Motive
Atif Hussein, an Abbottabad-based
journalist, believes local residents have good reason to doubt the official
story.
"I’ve spoken to scores of
people who lived near the compound," Hussein told Anadolu Agency.
"Although some of them were next-door neighbors, they never saw anything
to suggest that such a high-profile figure had lived there."
What’s more, he added, the
compound’s owners -- the Khan Brothers -- were well-known to the area and not
at all inclined to extremism.
"People generally believe the
whole drama was staged to give U.S. forces a face-saving exit from
Afghanistan," Hussein said.
"If the U.S. had produced
pictures of a dead bin Laden -- as it did with [Libya’s] Muammar Qaddafi and
[Iraq’s] Saddam Hussein -- there would have been little room for all these
conspiracy theories," the journalist added.
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