Osama bin Laden

March 11: One of Osama bin Laden’s wives was probably involved in revealing the hiding place where he was killed by American special forces last year, according to a retired Pakistani brigadier who has investigated the operation.

She was jealous of his youngest wife and may even have been used by al Qaida to sacrifice its sick and possibly senile leader, argues the former senior officer Shaukat Qadir.

Even more controversially, Qadir suggests that al Qaida was seeking the $25 million bounty on his head — and that bin Laden understood what was happening but had lost the will to live.

These theories wildly contradict the semi-official US story that the CIA traced bin Laden to his secret compound near the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad by following a “courier” who was his contact with the terrorist organisation.

The world’s most wanted man was shot dead in his bedroom on May 2 last year by a raiding party of US Navy Seals, who had flown in by helicopter from Afghanistan.

Pakistan complained that it had not been warned in advance. But Qadir, who has powerful connections in the Pakistani high command, suspects that its military intelligence service was involved.

The brigadier was allowed to visit the scene of the killing and to read the interrogations of survivors of the raid, including the three wives who were in the building. He also spoke to Pakistani intelligence officers and to tribal leaders who knew the bin Laden family.

Western terrorism experts have not accepted his conclusions, but in the absence of an official Pakistani version — a commission of inquiry is still sitting — this is the closest Pakistan has come to providing its account of what happened.

Qadir’s focus is on the actions of Khairiah Saber, a well-educated Saudi now in her 60s, who was the fourth of bin Laden’s six wives and mother of at least five of his sons.

Hollywood actress Jessica Chastain walks on Sunday on the sets of Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s upcoming film about Osama bin Laden in Chandigarh. (below) Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez arrives on the sets. Under the working title Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow’s film recounts the hunt for bin Laden. (AP and AFP pictures)

In the turmoil after the twin towers attack in 2001 and the allied invasion of Afghanistan, Saber took refuge in Iran, where she was held under house arrest. In 2008, she was released and told al Qaida that she wanted to be reunited with her husband, according to Qadir.

Bin Laden was by then living in his Abbottabad hideaway and sharing his bed with his sixth and youngest wife, Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada, a Yemeni in her early 30s.

Qadir said Saber’s wish to join this menage puzzled al Qaida. “Nobody really understood why she should want to come back to him. They had lost contact, there was nothing going on between them — he was bedding only Amal.”

Al Qaida’s chief of operations, Atiyah Abdul Rahman, was so suspicious that he “had her strip-searched and locked up” in October 2010. Bin Laden then intervened.

“Osama asked for her release somewhere in late February, early March 2011. From the moment this happens everything else starts to happen as well,” said Qadir.

Saber’s arrival in Abbottabad disrupted the household, including Amal and bin Laden’s fifth wife, Siham Sabar, and her 24-year-old son, Khalid.

Qadir explained: “In the house, everyone is suspicious of her and Khalid questions her, saying, ‘Why the hell have you come back?’ At a certain point in time, she responds with a slight smile on her face saying, ‘I have one more duty to perform for my husband. That’s what I’ve come for’.

“So he rushes over to his father and tells Osama this is what she’s just said and I think she’s going to betray you. So according to Amal, Osama looks quietly into space for a few seconds and responds, ‘So be it. It’s a wife’s duty to put her husband out of the pain that he’s in’.”

Had 54-year-old bin Laden given up? “I think so. I think he was suffering from some degenerative disease, in which he was losing his mental capacities and his physical abilities, with the sole exception of his sexual abilities. Those were unimpaired. He produced two children in Abbottabad. So, obviously, he was quite sexually active. Apart from that, he was losing everything and was becoming irrelevant to al Qaida.”

According to Qadir, bin Laden had been ousted as leader “in a silent, bloodless coup” in 2003. By 2011, he may have lost the will to live, the brigadier believes. “It’s almost as if he said ‘what the hell? I’m going to move on anyway’.”

Qadir based his account largely on the transcripts of the interrogation of bin Laden’s wives. One Pakistani intelligence officer told him that Saber “is so aggressive that she borders on being intimidating”.

Amal was talkative under questioning, directly accusing Saber of betraying bin Laden to American intelligence. But Qadir has a more complex theory about what happened.

In his view, Saber was motivated by revenge, “because everyone knew she was intensely jealous of Amal”, but “my feeling also is that al Qaida was party to selling him out”.

He conjectures — “I don’t have any proof” — that al Qaida passed the word through the Taliban to Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence service and ultimately the CIA that there was “someone very important” in Abbottabad.

He added: “My feeling is that sometime around April, March 2011 is when they started working on providing information through the Taliban, through the ISI and on to the CIA.”

Saber had no connection with the CIA, he believes, but her arrival in Abbottabad was an indication to those hunting bin Laden that he might be there. “Who else could have led them there?”

She arrived around the same time that Shakil Afridi, a local doctor now in custody, began to conduct medical checks on homes in the town — ostensibly to look for hepatitis but allegedly to try to find bin Laden’s DNA for the CIA. “It’s too much of a coincidence,” said Qadir.

Al Qaida was broke, he argues, and its motive in betraying bin Laden was to get hold of the $25 million the US had put on his head. “The supreme irony is that, if the money has been paid, then the CIA has paid to bring al Qaida back to life and has (killed) somebody who was totally irrelevant to al Qaida and who was dying anyway.”