Osamabilia: Laden with bin Laden’s loot

Memento hunters keep the memory of the notorious terrorist alive.

ISLAMABAD:

Without fail, a posting goes up every week on online auction site eBay selling what is purported to be one of Osama bin Laden’s teeth. The starting price is $1,500. Equally invariably, the posting is taken down by the site soon after for being fake.

Welcome to the world of Osama memorabilia, where scam artists, savvy businessmen, militant sympathisers and just plain old collectors keep the memory of the world’s most notorious terrorist alive.

At a small shop in Super Market in Islamabad, a shopkeeper has among his wares gaudy, plastic statues of a bearded man who looks suspiciously like the ex al-Qaeda leader. Priced at Rs300, the statue does turn out to be one of Osama, in a manner of speaking.

But, insists the shopkeeper, this has nothing to do with ideology. “I had these statues for a long time and they weren’t statues of him, but after he was killed I sold a few of them as Osama statues. Now, nobody even looks at them.” He says that he is considering removing them from his shop altogether, but for reasons of commerce, not taste.

Then there are those who descended to Abbottabad for a spot of scavenger hunting in the days after Osama was killed.

An Islamabad resident, who requested anonymity because of fears that the authorities may be interested in his booty, picked up a fuel valve from the US chopper that crashed near Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.

As he tells it, “I saw that journalists were posing with pieces of the copter in front of the compound so I went around looking for pieces for myself. I went to the backside of the compound and was picking up some debris when the child came up asking if I would be interested in something better, a bigger piece.”

He says that he got two pieces from the child for under a thousand rupees. According to him, Abbottabad was like a playground for memento hunters the day after Bin Laden was killed.

“Pretty much anyone who went there came back with some memorabilia,” the child said, adding that he had made quite a business out of selling these pieces, having also sold some to a group of visiting Australians.

Security officials had told him that they had collected everything they needed and so had restored access to the area, allowing people like him to take what was on the ground, the child explained.

He doesn’t plan on selling the piece, saying that those he tells about his collector’s item either refuse to believe it’s a piece of the chopper or suspect that they may be radioactive or have GPS tracking technology.

Meanwhile, there are also those who are selling artifacts of the Osama era to keep his ideology alive.

Hassan Ahmed, a resident of Islamabad, says that a mosque close to his office in the F-7 sector of the city was selling audiotapes and CDs of Osama’s speeches soon after he was killed. The cover of one of the CDs that he bought referenced Osama’s martyrdom and was a collection of the speeches he made both pre- and post-dating 9/11.

Ahmed says, “I’m sure they would have liked to sell T-shirts of Osama too but putting his face on a shirt may be un-Islamic.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 6^th, 2011.