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Pakistani security personnel stand guard outside the house where family members of slain Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden are believed to be held, in Islamabad on March 30, 2012. Osama bin Laden fathered four children as he hid out in Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks, his youngest wife, Amal Abdulfattah told interrogators, according to a police report seen by. (Getty Images)
HARIPUR, Pakistan (AP) — It's an ornate but not lavish two-story house tucked away at the end of a mud clogged street. This is where Pakistan's intelligence agency believes Osama bin Laden lived for nearly a year until he moved into the villa in which he was eventually killed.
The residence in the frontier town of Haripur was one of five safe houses used by the slain al-Qaida leader while on the run in Pakistan according to information revealed by his youngest wife, who has been detained.
Retired Pakistani Brig. Shaukat Qadir, who has spent the last eight months tracking bin Laden's movements, told The Associated Press that he was taken to the Haripur house last November by intelligence agents who located it from a description they got from Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada.
Al-Sada, a 30-year-old Yemeni, has been in Pakistani custody since May 2 when U.S. Navy SEALs overran the Abbottabad compound, killing bin Laden and four other people inside. Since then, Pakistan's intelligence agency, known as the ISI, has been trying to uncover the trail that brought him to Abbottabad villa in the summer of 2005.
The best information appears to have come from al-Sada, who was believed to be his favorite and who traveled with bin Laden since his escape from Afghanistan's eastern Tora Bora mountain range in 2001.
Qadir, a 35-year army veteran who is now a security consultant, was given rare access to transcripts of Pakistani intelligence's interrogation of al-Sada and access to other documents on bin-Laden's movements. He provided the AP with details in a recent interview.
The details of bin Laden's life as a fugitive — which were first published by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn — raise fresh questions over how bin Laden was able to remain undetected for so long in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, despite being the subject of a massive international manhunt.
Yet a senior U.S. official, who is familiar with the contents recovered in bin Laden's Abbottabad house, said there was no evidence that Pakistani officials were aware of bin Laden's presence. "There was no smoking gun. We didn't find anything," he said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the contents of the Abbottabad house
According to the interrogation report, bin Laden lived in five safe houses and fathered four children — the two youngest born in a public hospital in Abbotabad. But investigators have only located the houses in Abbottabad and Haripur.
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