Land for Bin Laden’s hideout purchased by his courier

Costing slightly over Rs4 million, the land was purchased from three different sellers.

ISLAMABAD:

The land on which Osama bin Laden’s hideout was constructed was purchased by one of his couriers from three different sellers for Rs4.09 million, between 2004 and 2005, according to official record at the city’s revenue and estate department.

Muhammad Arshad, one of Bin Laden’s two local couriers, acquired 6.65 kanals (3,990 square yards) of land before he started constructing the conspicuous, three-storied structure with high boundary walls.

The payment was made promptly and the money was transferred in Arshad’s name, according to the official record. His younger brother Tariq Khan, who lived in the same house, did not have a share in the ownership of the land.

Both brothers were killed in the US Navy SEAL team’s raid on the compound on May 2. Their families, however, survived the attack. Arshad allegedly purchased the land on a fake identity card which claimed he was the son of one Niqab Khan and belonged to Tangi town of tehsil and district Charsada in Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa.

However, one of Bin Laden’s three widows told Pakistani investigators after the US raid that the brothers, Arshad and Khan, belonged to district Shangla, near Swat.

The three deals

The first deal was concluded between Arshad and a retired revenue department official Abdul Rehman Khan on April 16, 2004, the official record in Abbottabad showed.

Khan, a resident of Nawan Sher village just outside Abbottabad, sold three kanals of land for Rs1.5 million.

He reportedly died a month ago.

The second parcel of land, measuring 0.65 kanals, was purchased from another man living in the Nawan Sher area named Raja Imtiaz Ahmed. The deal was concluded on October 2, 2004 under registry number 1522, according to the land revenue record. This piece of land was bought for Rs390,000.

The final deal was signed exactly a year after the first one, on April 16, 2005, whereby Dr Qazi Mahfoozul Haq sold three kanals of land for Rs2.2 million.

Haq originally belongs from Nowshera district but has lived in Abbottabad all his life.

Qazi said he found Arshad to be a modest man.

“I never imagined that the land I was selling would eventually serve as Osama’s hideout,” Haq said while talking to The Express Tribune at his clinic in the Mandian locality of Abbottabad.

He said he had bought the land for Rs1.5 million, almost nine months prior to selling it to Arshad.

“It was a great deal for me. I was happy at making quick and easy money and never thought what it would turn out to be,” he added.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 9^th, 2011.