Reuters | One of Osama bin Laden’s wives told Pakistani interrogators that the al Qaeda leader and his family had been living for five years in the compound where he was killed by U.S. forces this week, a security official said on Friday.
The official, who identified the woman as Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, the youngest of bin Laden’s three wives, told Reuters she was wounded in the U.S. raid on Monday.
The security official said Abdulfattah told investigators: “We have been living there for the past five years.”
Both Pakistan’s army and its powerful spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), have been facing mounting pressure to explain how it was possible for bin Laden to live deep inside Pakistan undetected for years.
Pakistani security forces took between 15 and 16 people into custody from the compound after U.S. forces removed bin Laden’s body, said the security official. Those detained included bin Laden’s three wives and several children.
Separately, a senior Pakistani intelligence official briefing Pakistani journalists on Thursday evening said that bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, fell out six years ago over the distribution of money. He gave no other details.