Osama moved to Pak in mid-2002, says report

ISLAMABAD: Osama bin Laden’s family had entered into Pakistan way back in October/November 2001, just around 9/11 while the then al-Qaeda chief joined them in Peshawar in mid-2002, a media report said quoting the findings of the Abbottabad Commission Report here.

The Report, which is yet to be made public, contains a treasure trove of information on the hunt for the world’s most wanted man Osama Bin Laden, the Dawn daily reported.

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, it reported.

Attash is said to be 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.

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, a source privy to the report’s details was quoted as saying.

The daily reported that 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”.

Talking about Kuwaiti, the report said 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”.

From here they moved to Swat where Osama was visited by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. Kuwaiti and his brother Ibrar (who had joined the fugitives in Swat) were with OBL and they all stayed in Haripur till 2005.
And it is here that the move to Abbottabad was planned and executed by Kuwaiti.
Osama’s right-hand man is the one who purchased a plot in Abbottabad by using a fake identity card and also supervised the construction of the house, which the report said was custom built.-PTI