Pak house where Osama lived in 2004 up for rent for 150 pounds

Islamabad, Mar 10 (ANI): A smart house in a Pakistani town, just over 20 miles north of Islamabad, where Osama bin Laden and his family lived in 2004 before shifting to their Abbottabad compound, is all set to be rented out for 150 pounds per month.

According to a new research, no one took much notice of the two brothers who moved their families, but eight years later, a shocking question is emerging whether bin Laden could have lived in the four-bedroom house in Haripur, The Telegraph reports.

Intelligence sources, local testimony and research by a retired army officer suggest the two-storey villa is a missing link in the story of how bin Laden, his three wives, children and grandchildren eventually arrived in the town of Abbottabad, where they were discovered last year.

Umar Hayat, a neighbour, said he was stunned. He remembered two brothers living in the house, members of the Pashtun tribe from the north-west of the country.

"I am astonished. This is new to me," he said. "But when I think about it I remember there were Pathans living there at one time, and they kept their gate shut which was unusual." The world's most wanted man was killed on May 2. He was traced when his courier made a call to a telephone that was under surveillance leading the CIA to the house where he had hidden "in plain sight" for six years.

Painstaking research by Brigadier Shaukat Qadir, who interviewed Pakistani intelligence officers and an al-Qaeda leader, suggests the courier and his brother were the two Pashtun men who rented the house in Haripur as they waited for their bespoke home in nearby Abbottabad to be built.

"It's not very secluded but at this time he must have thought no one was looking for him in this sort of area. Anyway it was only temporary and after seven or eight months they moved on," he said.

They paid about 100 pounds per month for the house, according to its owner, Qasi Anis Ur-Rehman.

"When I visited I only went into the sitting room, no further. I didn't think that was odd because it is the custom when there are women somewhere else in the house," he said, adding that Save the Children rented it after the Pashtun brothers left.

The empty house is now back on the rental market for about 150 pounds. (ANI)