New Delhi, May 4: Biogeographer Thomas Gillespie had predicted two years ago that Osama bin Laden’s likely hideout would be a large building with several rooms and a high boundary wall in a town in Pakistan — not a cave in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Gillespie and his colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, had also applied theories from ecology to generate a probability map for finding Osama. And Abbottabad, where Osama was killed yesterday, fell within the map’s 85 per cent probability zone.

The UCLA researchers had combined satellite imagery with two ecological theories widely used in the study of wildlife to predict — in 2009 — that Osama was most likely to be found in Pakistan’s north-western town of Parachinar, about 290km west of Islamabad.

Abbottabad is about 50km northeast of Islamabad.

Their research which, they said, grew out of informal conversations in the geography department was published in MIT International Review, a journal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The researchers also predicted features of Osama’s hideout based on his needs. “We said walls over three metres tall, we also said it would be a tall building with electricity, space between structures, and more than three rooms,” Gillespie told The Telegraph.

The building in Abbottabad where Osama was killed by US personnel does have 12ft- to 18ft- high boundary walls, even a seven-foot privacy wall on a terrace, a large number of rooms — just as predicted.

The scientists said the distance-decay theory used in ecology predicted that Osama would be closest to the place where he was last reported and in a region with similar physical environment and cultural composition — similar political and religious beliefs.

They picked Tora Bora, a mountain site in Afghanistan, as Osama’s last known location in November 2001, based on reported interceptions of radio traffic. “The further he moves from his last reported location... the greater the probability that he will find himself in different cultural surroundings, thereby increasing the probability of his being captured or eliminated,” Gillespie and his colleagues had said in their paper.

The distance-decay theory indicated the highest probability of finding Osama — 98 per cent — in Kurram valley in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Parachinar was the largest and closest city within a 20km radius of the Tora Bora site.

The island biogeography theory predicted that Osama was likely to be in a large town rather than a small town or an isolated village where it would be relatively easier to spot him. The UCLA researchers did not mention Abbottabad in their paper, but predicted that living near or in a large city would reduce Osama’s chances of exposure or elimination in a raid on a small town or isolated structure.

Scientists say the idea of using ecological principles in the search for a fugitive is novel.

“Academically, this is a cool piece of work, but practically, I don’t think it would have been too useful,” said Anindita Bhadra, a fellow in the behaviour and ecology laboratory of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Calcutta.

“I don’t think it could have been taken seriously as a predictive study. At the most, it could have been used as a working hypothesis to search in big cities of Pakistan,” Bhadra said.

The UCLA researchers had said it is unlikely that Osama would live in caves. A cave would have to be heated and ventilated and the steady transport of supplies would have been easy to track down. They had also ruled out Afghanistan because of the presence of US and international forces in the area at the time.

“The Pakistan side of the border is much better for hiding because of its ambiguous political status within the country and formal absence of US or Nato troops,” John Agnew, geography professor and study co-author had said in a statement issued through the university when the paper was published two years ago.

Gillespie has long since turned to his primary research interests — the study of trees in tropical forests.