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US officials to visit Bin Laden's compound

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2011-05-04 18:45

ISLAMABAD -- Pakistan army chief General Ashfaque Pervez Kayani is scheduled to pay a visit on Wednesday to the compound of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad together with intelligence officials and high US officials, reported local Urdu TV channel Geo News.

According to the report, Kayani will visit the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed during a US-led military operation conducted in the wee hours of early Monday morning and view the site of the operation.

Xinhua correspondents in Abbottabad said that the security on the road leading from Islamabad to Abbottabad has been blocked with heavy security, which is located about 100 kilometers north of the country's capital. The security around the compound of Osama bin Laden has apparently been beefed up.

Despite the fact that many foreign and local media people are now gathering around the compound of Osama Bin Laden, they are not allowed to go inside.

On Tuesday the security authorities allowed the media people to take a closer look at the compound by keeping them at a distance of six meters away from the compound, which is surrounded by high concrete walls with barbed wires set on top of them.

The pictures taken by Xinhua on Monday and Tuesday showed some of the wreckage of a US chopper crashed on the site during the early Monday morning raid as well as a burned house inside the compound.

One of the pictures showed a crashed US chopper on one side of the walls of the compound with its tail resting against the wall of the compound and its head nose-diving on the ground outside the wall. The crashed chopper was later moved away with some of the wreckage of the gadgets on the plane left over around the site.

The two-to-three-storied white mansion built inside the compound looks not as good as imagined, at least it is not like a mansion built with one million US dollars reported by US media. Instead it is quite an ordinary house except its large size.

The Geo News report quoted well-informed sources as saying that the compound which has been sealed off for more than two days could be open to media coverage after the visit by Pakistan army chief and US officials on Wednesday.