By Saeed Shah, McClatchy Newspapers –
ISLAMABAD — Pakistani authorities said Thursday that they had filed charges against Osama bin Laden’s three widows as an investigation revealed fresh details of the dead al-Qaida leader’s family life in Pakistan — including suspicions by two of the women that the oldest wife would betray him.
The three widows — who have been in Pakistani custody since U.S. forces found and killed bin Laden last May in the northern town of Abbottabad — had been expected to be freed until Pakistan’s interior minister said they would be charged with crimes related to entering the country illegally.
The charges came as Shaukat Qadir, a retired brigadier who maintains ties to top levels of the Pakistani army, claims to have pieced together the most comprehensive account yet of bin Laden’s life after he fled Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains in late 2001.
Qadir believes that bin Laden likely had undergone a kidney transplant, was living in effective retirement in Abbottabad and may have gone senile. The tranquility of his large household was shattered when it was joined early last year by the oldest of his remaining three wives, Qadir said in an interview.
There were 27 people packed into the house in Abbottabad when U.S. Navy SEALs arrived on the night of May 2, 2011. But until a few months before that, when bin Laden’s oldest surviving wife, Khairiah Sabar, joined them, they had all got on well, Qadir found.
“When Khairiah came, everybody else was very suspicious of her. They didn’t trust her at all,” Qadir said.
“Everything begins to happen with her arrival. Until then, the Americans seem to know nothing.”
It was Khairiah who sold out bin Laden, Qadir said, although it wasn’t clear whom she would have communicated with once inside. His account also is at odds with the story leaked by American officials, which contends that they found the Abbottabad house by following an al-Qaida courier known as “al-Kuwaiti” to the home some time in the second half of 2010.
Qadir called the courier story “fictitious,” but his full report, which has yet to be published, already has come under some criticism for its heavy reliance on Pakistani military sources.
Qadir said that he relied on notes of interrogations by Pakistani intelligence agents of bin Laden’s wives, which were made available to him through his military contacts. He also conducted his own research. Qadir is known to be close to Pakistan’s current army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who arranged several visits for him to the Abbottabad compound, which was cordoned off by security forces after the U.S. raid.
The compound was suddenly demolished, without explanation, by the Pakistani authorities late last month.
Bin Laden may have had a kidney transplant in 2002 — which would explain why his known kidney ailment did not require him to undergo dialysis treatment while on the run. Still, he was suffering from a degenerative disease that apparently brought on senility. As a result, al-Qaida’s leadership council, or shura, sent him into an early retirement around 2003 in Pakistan, Qadir said.
That theory again contrasts with the view of some U.S. officials, who say bin Laden stayed active in al-Qaida’s affairs and had some involvement in planning attacks in the West, as well as remaining a spiritual guide to the organization. However, it could explain childlike images that emerged on videotapes found at the Abbottabad house, with bin Laden sitting on the floor watching television with fascination.
