The bulldozers yesterday razed to the ground the three-storey home where Osama bin Laden hid for five years until he was killed by US special forces last May.
The outer wall will remain intact for the moment and we don’t know the plan for the future
Only the wall of the compound remained intact, surrounding the debris of the house where the Al-Qaeda leader secretly lived in the garrison town of Abbottabad.
The house was pulled down two months before the first anniversary of the US Navy Seal raid that killed the world’s most-wanted man on an operation that humiliated Pakistan’s army and government.
The fact that Bin Laden lived so long just two kilometres from the country’s premier military academy and in a garrison city exposed the powerful military to charges of complicity or incompetence.
“The demolition has been completed, the three storey building was razed to the ground,” a security official said.
“We have been ordered to be deployed here until further instructions. The outer wall will remain intact for the moment and we don’t know the plan for the future. First we will remove the debris.”
Bulldozers began the demolition work late on Saturday in Abbottabad’s Bilal Town suburb, where the compound has been under the control of Pakistani security forces since the Americans ended their covert operation on May 2.
The debris from the flattened house was invisible from street level, hidden behind the 18-foot high boundary wall of the compound that not only housed the Al-Qaeda leader but his three wives and nine children too.
From the rooftops of surrounding houses, bricks, concrete, steel, broken wood, a brown steel gate and two black plastic water tanks could be seen with two bulldozers parked near the heap of rubble.
“We found nothing in the building. Everything had already been taken away by the investigation experts,” the security official said.
The compound has been closely guarded by Pakistani security officials since the May 2 operation. Foreign journalists in particular have been heavily restricted from visiting the site and local journalists from coming too close.
The house stood less than 800 metres from one of the Pakistan army’s top training academies.
Officials did not explain why the house was destroyed. Some residents of Abbottabad thought it should be a tourist attraction, although given the sensitivities surrounding the property it was hard to see the government developing it as one.
Property documents show the land was owned by a man who later served as a courier for Bin Laden. He is believed to have been killed during the raid.