Pakistan Completes Demolition of bin Laden Hideout

Bulldozers razed to the ground on Monday the infamous three-story home in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden 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 where the al-Qaida 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 Pakistan 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 Pakistan-U.S. relations.

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

The compound has been closely guarded by Pakistani 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 militants in a country where attacks blamed on the Taliban and al-Qaida 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 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 militants opposed to girls' education.

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

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

The then-military ruler, Zia ul Haq, demolished the central jail in the garrison city of Rawalpindi where former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged in 1979, and the prison moved to a suburb.

Bhutto's Pakistan 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 Pakistan'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 Pakistani journalist and an expert on militancy, Rahimullah Yusufzai.