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Pakistan Completes Demolition of bin Laden Hideout
[An Nahar] Bulldozers razed to the ground on Monday the infamous three-story home in Pakistain where the late Osama bin Laden
... who was laid out deader than a mackerel...
lived for at least five years until he was killed by U.S. special forces last May.

Only the wall of the compound remained intact, obscuring the debris of the house in the garrison town of Abbottabad
... A pleasant city located only 30 convenient miles from Islamabad. The city is noted for its nice weather and good schools. It is the site of Pakistain's military academy, which was within comfortable walking distance of the residence of the late Osama bin Laden....
where the al-Qaeda chief hid with his three wives and nine children, 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the capital.

Officials were reluctant for the site to become a shrine and the house was pulled down two months before the first anniversary of the secret U.S. Navy SEAL raid that has been described as the Pakistain army's biggest humiliation.

The fact that bin Laden lived so long just a mile from the country's premier military academy exposed the powerful military to charges of complicity or incompetence and dealt a massive blow to Pakistain-U.S. relations.

"The demolition has been completed, the three-story building was razed to the ground," a security official told Agence La Belle France Presse.

"We have been ordered to be deployed here until further instructions. The outer wall will remain intact for the moment and we don't know the plan for the future. First we will remove the debris."

Bulldozers began the demolition work late Saturday in Abbottabad's Bilal Town, which was propelled from a quiet suburb to international notoriety after the al-Qaeda leader was killed on May 2.

The debris from the flattened house was invisible from street level, hidden behind the 18-foot-high boundary wall of the compound.

But from the rooftops of surrounding houses, heaps of bricks, concrete slabs, twisted steel, broken wooden doors, a brown steel gate and two black plastic water tanks could be seen alongside two parked bulldozers.

"We found nothing in the building. Everything had already been taken away by the investigation experts," the security official told Agence La Belle France Presse.

The compound has been closely guarded by Pak security officials since the decisive U.S. operation. Foreign journalists in particular have been heavily restricted from visiting the site and local journalists from coming too close.

Hundreds of people visited after bin Laden's killing, provoking concern that it could become a shrine to Islamist gunnies in a country where attacks blamed on the Taliban and al-Qaeda have killed thousands in recent years.

The Americans buried bin Laden's body at sea, determined that no grave act as a memorial to the criminal mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

A provincial government official said the hideout had been destroyed because "the structure had become weak and cracks had appeared" following the U.S. raid, posing a risk to people who continued to visit out of curiosity.

"Moreover, since people used to come to the site in large numbers the authorities had to make special security arrangements, thereby incurring unnecessary expenditure," he said, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity.

He said no decision had been taken on the future of the site.

Many people living in the neighborhood want a girls' school erected on the bin Laden plot -- providing the local community with something they lack and a slap in the face for Islamist gunnies opposed to girls' education.

"It will be the best message to the world because gunnies are against girls' education," said Mohammad Siddique, who watched the bulldozers smash through the brick and concrete.

It is not the first time that Pakistain has faced a tricky decision about what to do with a particularly sensitive site.

The then-military ruler, Zia ul Haq
...the creepy-looking former dictator of Pakistain. Zia was an Islamic nutball who imposed his nutballery on the rest of the country with the enthusiastic assistance of the nation's religious parties, which are populated by various other nutballs. He was appointed Chief of Army Staff in 1976 by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom he hanged when he seized power. His time in office was a period of repression, with hundreds of thousands of political rivals, minorities, and journalists executed or tortured, including senior general officers convicted in coup-d'ètat plots, who would normally be above the law. As part of his alliance with the religious parties, his government helped run the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, providing safe havens, American equipiment, Saudi money, and Pak handlers to selected mujaheddin. Zia died along with several of his top generals and admirals and the then United States Ambassador to Pakistain Arnold Lewis Raphel when he was assassinated in a suspicious air crash near Bahawalpur in 1988...
, demolished the central jail in the garrison city of Rawalpindi where former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
...9th PM of Pakistain from 1973 to 1977, and 4th President of Pakistain from 1971 to 1973. He was the founder of the Pakistain Peoples Party (PPP). His eldest daughter, Benazir Bhutto, would also serve as hereditary PM. In a coup led by General Zia-ul-Haq, Bhutto was removed from office and was executed in 1979 for authorizing the murder of a political opponent...
was hanged in 1979, and the prison moved to a suburb.

Bhutto's Pakistain People's Party tried to build a monument to his last days, but the work was stopped and a subsequent government converted the site into a public park named after Pakistain's founding father Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

"By demolishing this compound they want to remove Osama's name from Abbottabad history but you can't delete history," said Pak journalist and an expert on militancy, Rahimullah Yusufzai.

Posted by: Fred 2012-02-28
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=339852