It turns out that Abbottabad, Pakistan is just the sort of town you’d expect to find a character like Osama bin Laden hiding — in just the sort of compound where he was found and killed.
The temperate town in northern Pakistan known for attracting tourists is also apparently a popular destination among suspected terrorists. Pakistani authorities have arrested two high-profile terror suspects in Abbottabad since January: Umar Patek, a suspect in the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 200 people, and Tahir Shehzad, an apparent al Qaeda facilitator.
If you were looking for Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, you might want to look at the million-dollar compound at the end of a narrow dirt road that is eight times larger than any other houses in the area, is surrounded by 18-foot walls topped with barbed wire, has security gates, no Internet connection, and where they burn the trash rather than put it out for collection like the neighbors. “Everything we saw… was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden’s hideout to look like,” a senior administration official told reporters Sunday when revealing those details.
The hideout has only been around since about 2005, the official said. “Intelligence analysts concluded that this compound was custom-built to hide someone of significance,” the official noted.
It’s also becoming painfully obvious that elements of the Pakistani military knew or should have known bin Laden was there. A major Pakistani military academy is located in Abbottabad, which is 35 miles north of Islamabad, and the town is a popular retirement spot for Pakistani military brass. “The area is relatively affluent,” the official said, “with lots or retired military.”