Nearly 10 years ago, Osama bin Laden successfully dodged dozens of US and British forces closing in on his cave-haven in the Tora Bora mountains near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan but not before getting his leg injured with a wound that would force him to come to his Abbottabad compound before he was killed there on May 2 by the US Navy SEALs.
Three weeks after dislodging the Taliban government in December 2001, the US forces launched an operation to kill or capture the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in the Tora Bora mountains. At one point it was believed that the al Qaeda chief had also died in the heavy bombardment by the US forces along with dozens of his followers. However, as it turned out later, he had escaped from Tora Bora and after spending some months in Afghanistan he had started his journey towards Pakistan.
“The intelligence information that is being gathered after bin Laden’s killing shows that he got seriously injured in the heavy bombardment by the coalition forces back at Tora Bora and the wound in his leg also developed an infection,” said an official. The reports that he had been there continuously for years were ‘rubbish’. “His Yemini wife, Amal Ahmed Abdullfattah though lived at the compound for the last five years, as she said herself,” he said.
“Had it not been that wound and kidney problem, bin Laden wouldn’t have been found and killed at the compound in Abbottabad,” he said adding that even if one talked about the two physical problems that bin Laden was facing it was more because of the leg injury than kidney ailment, that he would come to the targeted compound and spend some days there.
