'They never allowed their children to buy Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola'

Hiding for years behind the high walls constructed with grey cement blocks and topped with barbed wire, Osama bin Laden, with the assistance of his two aides, behaved in such a way that his neighbours seldom found anything mysterious about the otherwise unusually large compound.
"They had concealed their presence very well," said an intelligence official as he monitored the house, located in a lower-middle class area. The official took videos of the journalists and ordinary citizens visiting the place where bin Laden was killed in a raid by US special forces on Monday morning.
"I live just few hundred metres from here and I used to visit this area but I never suspected that something wrong is going on there," he said, looking at the outer wall of the compound where barbed-wire was damaged by the helicopter that brushed it before crashing inside during the operation.
Fields are all around the three-storey building with two large courtyards whose cream-coloured paint is fading, sprawling over an area of around a third of a hectare. Apple and eucalyptus trees inside the courtyard of bin Laden's house bent with the wind, as two policemen guarded the sealed iron gates. Three other policemen were standing alert on nearby roofs.
Neighbours watched from the windows or roofs of their houses on Monday when US commandos stormed bin Laden's house and heard the sound of guns firing, mixed with the screams of women and children. And still no one is ready to believe that the al Qaeda chief ever lived there.
"I have never seen Osama here. I never had any suspicions about the people who were living in this house," said Abdul Rashid, 32, who is running a grocery shop hardly 50 metres from the compound.
"All I know is that two brothers lived here. Their names were Arshad and Tariq. They were good people," Rashid said angrily as his customers nodded in affirmation. "They would come here with children to buy sweets, biscuits, chocolates and ice-cream for the children. At a time they would bring five to six children."
"But there was one thing special about them. They never allowed their children to buy Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola," Rashid said, referring to two US brands that some Islamists dismiss as Jewish. Tariq and Arshad, killed in the US operation, would drive some of bin Laden's roughly a dozen children by three wives to school and take them to nearby fields in their free time, allowing them to run around, but only under their watchful gaze.
But they were not allowed to mix with other children in the neighbourhood. Not to create any suspicion, the children were mainly taught the local Pashtu language and a bit of Pakistan's national language Urdu, but not the Arabic of their father. "Their children mainly spoke to each other in Pashtu. They could also speak Urdu," said Abdul Wahid, a 28-year-old Urdu, as he sprayed pesticides in a cauliflower field, just a few metres from the backyard of bin Laden's compound, while singing a popular love song.
"They wore the shalwar kameez (traditional Pakistani loose trousers and long shirt) and sometimes pant-shirt," he said. The fact that they did not have much contact with the neighbours did not raise any suspicions about them, he added.
"I am a poor farmer and they had money. They had a big house and vehicles. If they don't talk to me, why should I complain?" said Wahid, turning around apruptly and spraying another plant, possibly to hide his embarrassment that he is poor. A few metres away a young military officer, accompanied by half a dozen soldiers, monitored the area swarming with dozens of reporters from local and international media, a presence that disturbed many locals.
"There are everywhere either policemen and soldiers or journalists. Because of them women and children have stopped coming out of their houses and my business is going down," Rashid said. An old man, resident of the house opposite bin Laden's compound, pretended to be a deaf when asked about the occupants of the compound. "Yes, I live here but I cannot hear," he replied when a journalist asked him to describe the neighbours. The swift burial of bin Laden at sea and the US government's refusal to release photos of his body have created further doubt.
Mubashar, who identified himself only by his first name, said: "They kept Saddam Hussein in custody for years and dumped Osama's body in one night in the sea. How is it possible? Why should I believe them?" The residents of this house were God fearing and helped the poor, Mubashar said. They slaughtered 10 goats at the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Azha and distributed all the meat among the poor. No beggar ever has left empty-handed from their door, he said. "This is not Osama but a drama which has been played in our neighbourhood," said Rashid the shopkeeper, with a great sense of disbelief. "Its just a conspiracy to defame Pakistan."