Intelligence officials discovered the compound in August while monitoring an al-Qaida courier. The CIA had been hunting that courier for years, ever since detainees told interrogators that the courier was so trusted by bin Laden that he might very well be living with the al-Qaida leader.
Pakistani policemen walk past a compound, surrounded in red fabric, where locals reported a firefight took place overnight in Abbottabad, located in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province May 2, 2011. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in a firefight with US forces in Pakistan on Sunday, ending a nearly 10-year worldwide hunt for the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Obama said US forces led a targeted operation that killed bin Laden in Abbotabad north of Islamabad. REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood
US reports said it was one of the largest in an affluent neighbourhood. Built around five years ago, it was estimated to be worth around a million dollars (s600,000)
[caption id="attachment_1901" align="aligncenter" width="580" caption="Bin Laden’s Compound On Google Maps (heraldsun)"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1904" align="aligncenter" width="460" caption="An image purporting to show Osama bin Laden's bloody corpse, right, is a composite of two separate images, left and centre. Photograph: twitpic"][/caption]
An image apparently showing a dead Osama bin Laden broadcast on Pakistani television and picked up by British newspaper websites is a fake.
The bloodied image of a man with matted hair and a blank, half-opened eye has been circulating on the internet for the past two years. It was used on the front pages of the Mail, Times, Telegraph, Sun and Mirror websites, though swiftly removed after the fake was exposed on Twitter.
[caption id="attachment_1905" align="aligncenter" width="460" caption="The Daily Mail was one of the newspaper websites to publish the fake picture of Osama bin Laden's body."][/caption]
Sources:www.guardian.co.uk, heraldsun, REUTERS, twitpic