'US had a mole right inside Osama's hideout'

Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik believes the United States had a mole right inside Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad hideout and this was how the Al Qaeda chief was tracked down to the compound, a media report said on Sunday.

Top US officials said after the raid that they were only partially certain of Osama's presence inside the $1 million mansion, but Malik says only definitive information could have led them right to the room where bin Laden was killed, according to a report in The Sunday Times.

The report also says that bin Laden's Saudi wives believe it was his younger Yemeni wife Amal who betrayed him.

"In my experience of years as an intelligence officer, I think someone from inside may have given information," said Malik, the interior minister and former head of Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency.

"If the Americans didn't have definitive information, they couldn't have gone straight to the room where bin Laden was," he was quoted as saying by the paper.

It also said that the Al Qaeda leader had fathered twins from his Yemeni wife while in hiding in his high-walled mansion in Abbottabad.

A pocket guide carried by the US Navy SEALs who killed Osama, suggests "bin Laden had fathered twins in captivity" referring to the unidentified children born this year to his youngest wife Amal, 28.

According to the report, the document will provoke new questions about how bin Laden was tracked down in what President Barack Obama described as "one of the greatest intelligence successes in American history".

The document, left behind in the compound, lists the names and ages of those who were present, including bin Laden's wives, children and grandchildren. It also details where they lived in the compound and when some of them arrived.

According to the report, after the mission Obama said he had been "only 45 per cent to 55 per cent sure that bin Laden was even in the compound".

The document, which is believed to have been carried by all the SEALs on the mission, however, indicates that US intelligence was certain of his presence. Some Pakistani officials, including Malik, believe the briefing points to the presence of a mole in the compound.

The two elder Saudi wives of bin Laden have accused Amal of betraying bin Laden, either by supplying information or by allowing herself to be tracked to the compound.

According to the report, bin Laden was living with three wives whose whereabouts since the September 21 attacks of 2001 had been unknown. It states that his third wife, Khayrya Sabir, had been in Iranian custody until July 2010 along with their son Hamza.

There have been reports of visits to the compound by donors and a Taliban commander. The other possibility is that US drone technology is far more sophisticated than hitherto realised.

The document also bears details that suggest there may be more to the story of how bin Laden was tracked down. It reveals for the first time that the two courier brothers moved to Abbottabad in 2006 from Mardan, a city about 104 km west, that is still home to thousands of Afghan refugees.

It was in Mardan that Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the Al Qaeda No 3, was captured in May 2005. According to the Guantanamo detainee assessment published by WikiLeaks, he was caught while waiting for a courier.

He had previously been living in Abbottabad. According to the report, an employee at Abbottabad Post Office was tracked after he received suspiciously large cash transfers and he led investigators to Umar Patek, one of the Bali bombers, arrested in Abbottabad in January.

All these arrests in the same area seem more than coincidence, it said. "It is quite possible a false or partial narrative was given of how bin Laden was found," said a CIA official.

"Intelligence can only function in silence and in the dark - protecting source and method is very important".