The man in charge of bulldozing the house that was home to Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in February is selling bricks and other paraphernalia to tourists, reported the Telegraph.
Shakeel Ahmad told the British newspaper that his salvage yard in Abbottabad, where Bin Laden lived with his family for years before being killed in a U.S. operation on May 2 last year, had “become a tourist attraction for visitors looking for a souvenir.”
Ahmad holds under 200,000 bricks from the house which he says can be used to build homes, adding that some visitors were buying them as mementoes or gifts.
Pakistani authorities destroyed the Bin Laden compound in February this year, ostensibly to rid itself of all associations with the terror leader.
Bin Laden is believed to have moved to Abbottabad in 2004 with his wives and family, evading authorities in Pakistan and the United States until he was finally found and targeted by a special military force in May last year.
Pakistan deported Bin Laden’s widows and children to Saudi Arabia late last month.
Documents retrieved from the Bin Laden raid show a leader in charge of a terror organization but also one that was weakened, writes the Telegraph.As Bin Laden had no Internet access, he was reliant on couriers to deliver documents so communication was a long-drawn out process.
He had lost many key operatives of al-Qaeda in drone strikes which lowered morale. The Telegraph reports that Bin Laden’s orders of attacks were met with skepticism, according to an American counterterrorism official privy to the documents.
Some documents also revealed Bin Laden’s “ethics” on terrorist acts. This was demonstrated in the case of Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad who planned to bomb a car in New York Times Square in May 2010.
Bin Laden denounced Shahzad, not because he planned an attack, but because he did so after “swearing a loyalty oath to the United States as a newly naturalized citizen,” reports the Telegraph.
He said telling such a lie to the enemy was not allowed.
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