Secret Held if Bin Laden Lived Here, Village Says

Bin Laden’s youngest wife, who was detained after the raid that killed her husband, told Pakistani investigators that they lived for more than five years in their last home, in Abbottabad, and before that spent two and a half years in this village of roughly 1,500 people, some 25 miles to the south.

But the feudal landlord who owns much of the land in the area, his tenant farmers and the local police were all in disbelief.

“It’s a joke, played on all of us,” the local police inspector said as he patrolled the village, checking on security after a horde of journalists turned up there looking for Bin Laden’s erstwhile home. “It’s absurd,” he said. He asked not to be named in keeping with police force rules.

“It’s impossible,” said Liaquat Khan, the main landowner in the region, whose ancestor Shah Muhammad gave his name to the village and founded the nearby town of Haripur. “It is a very open place, with 50 houses, and they are very poor people who live there,” he said.

While the surrounding district has been known to harbor militants, there seemed little sign here that this village could. There is no walled compound or well-protected house like that used by Bin Laden in the city of Abbottabad. Farmers live in simple houses, with a few rooms surrounding a courtyard where children play among the buffalo and chickens. Most everyone knows everyone else here, and many are related in some way.

“Everybody has a very small house and they are overcrowded,” said Muhammad Saleem, a 35-year-old chicken farmer. “There is no place to rent, and we could not give a room to a stranger.”

Mr. Khan insisted that the feudal system is such that no villager would host an outsider without checking first with him. “They give me daily reports from the village,” he said of his tenants.

The one anomaly in the village was the mullah’s house, which was a palatial two-story building with high columns and deep verandah — but uninhabited and still under construction. The mullah, Noor Muhammad, was not at home but his two sons said that it went against tradition to rent your home out to a stranger.

“There is only one stranger here,” said Muhammad Iqbal, 36, one of the mullah’s sons. “He lives in the next-door village. He is Roshan Khan, an Afghan shepherd, and he lives in a tent,” he said. Mr. Iqbal said the money to build the house had come from another brother who had been working for 10 years in Saudi Arabia.

Still, if Chak Shah Muhammad does not reveal an obvious hiding place for a fugitive, the town of Haripur, just a mile away, and the wider Haripur District, which adjoins Abbottabad, has harbored its share of militants.

Over the years since the Sept. 11 attacks, about 20 militants have been arrested in the district, the police say. Most of the militants were members of Pakistani groups, like Sipah-e-Sahaba, but at least one was a foreigner suspected of ties to Al Qaeda.

In May 2009, a local house owner went to the police to complain that his tenant, an Egyptian, had not paid him rent for three months. The police raided the house and detained the man, who was known as Abdullah al-Misri, and found a wealth of jihadist propaganda videos and other material. Mr. Misri had been living in the house, just 10 minutes from the center of Haripur, for four years apparently unknown to and unhindered by the local police and intelligence services.

The police, who believed Mr. Misri was a member of Al Qaeda, allowed his wife and four daughters to remain in the house but kept them under surveillance. Then later that year, gunmen attacked the police and tried to take the women away. Three policemen were killed in the attack and one gunman was killed. He was named as Ijaz, from Abbottabad, and was found to have connections to Al Qaeda.

As often happens in Pakistan, the state failed to prosecute Mr. Misri on any charges of militancy or terrorism. He was imprisoned on immigration violations and released on bail in 2010, whereupon he disappeared, along with his family.

On Saturday, officials in Haripur District did not seem to take the report of Bin Laden hiding here seriously.

The deputy police chief of Haripur, Najib Bhagvi, conceded that there were people with extremist sympathies in the district who could help such fugitives. Nevertheless he ruled out the chances that Bin Laden had lived in the area. “There is not a single chance of having such a high-level target here,” he said.

“If he was in this area, certainly the authorities should have been looking much more carefully,” said Omar Ayub Khan, a former state minister of finance who lives in Haripur. “But he came here from Afghanistan, and American forces should have been looking more carefully when he escaped from there,” he said.

An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Haripur, Pakistan.

View the original article here

Asked and Answered | Bob Biram: A Missouri Village at the Center of It All

While the village, 62 miles east-northeast of Springfield, is happily obscure, said its mayor, Bob Biram, it has had at least one other interesting occurrence: During the Civil War, according to local legend, a young man now known as Grandpa Hicks fought for the South, while another youngster, Grandpa Benson, chose the North. During a battle, Grandpa Benson was said to have captured Grandpa Hicks and proceeded to lock him in a root cellar. Grandpa Hicks was able to dig his way to freedom with a pocketknife. After the war, they met up again in Plato and became lifelong friends.

Mr. Biram, 66, discusses the village’s newfound fame.

Q. What has been the response in Plato to the news that it is at the very center of America?

A. Well, it’s something that doesn’t happen very often. People are talking about it. They are planning big things. The school is planning some sort of program.

Q. Tell me more about the plans.

A. It will be May 9. The band will play. The color guard will be there. There will be barbecues. (In the background, the mayor’s wife, Susan Biram, can be heard prompting him). The choir will sing patriotic songs. We’ll have the celebration right in the middle of town, which is not very big — about half a mile either way. I think we can fit everybody in town, but I’m not sure. We haven’t tried it before.

Q. How many people live in Plato?

A. At the time of the census there were just 109 people. We’re down to about 100 now. We’re near Fort Leonard Wood, so people are in and out all the time.

Q. What’s there to do in town?

A. There’s really not much to do. There are two churches and the bank. There’s also a welding shop and a cafe. And the school. The school is where most of the activity is. There’s baseball and basketball of all sorts and volleyball.

Q: Have people been showing up in town out of curiosity?

A. There’s been some people dropping in at the bank wanting to know if there are T-shirts or brochures or something. We did have some postcards made up. We ordered about 100, and we thought that was plenty to go around, but we ran out. They sold like hot cakes. We’ve ordered 200 more. (The postcards cost 50 cents apiece.)

Q: Will you be prepared for the day when the country’s population migrates even farther to the south and west and Plato won’t be at the center of things anymore?

A. We understand that. I think the town east of us, Edgar Springs, had it for the past 10 years. It’s just our turn. We’ll accept it and then move on.

 

A Village With the Numbers, Not the Image, of the Poorest Place

And, yet, officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income.

About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically.

Women marry young, remain in the village to raise their families and, according to religious strictures, do not use birth control. As a result, the median age (under 12) is the lowest in the country and the household size (nearly six) is the highest. Mothers rarely work outside the home while their children are young.

Most residents, raised as Yiddish speakers, do not speak much English. And most men devote themselves to Torah and Talmud studies rather than academic training — only 39 percent of the residents are high school graduates, and less than 5 percent have a bachelor’s degree. Several hundred adults study full time at religious institutions.

The concentration of poverty in Kiryas Joel, (pronounced KIR-yas Jo-EL) is not a deliberate strategy by the leaders of the Satmar sect, said Joel Oberlander, 30, a title examiner who lives in Williamsburg. “It puts a great strain on their resources,” he said. “They would love to see the better earners of the community relocate as well to balance the situation, but why would they?”

Still, the Census Bureau’s latest poverty estimates, based on the 2005-9 American Community Survey released last year, do not take into account the community’s tradition of philanthropy and no-interest loans. Moreover, some families may be eligible for public benefits because they earn low salaries from the religious congregations and other nonprofit groups that run businesses and religious schools. Nearly half of the village’s residents with jobs work for the public or parochial schools.

“If people want to work in a religious setting and make less than they would earn at B & H, that’s a choice people make,” said Gedalye Szegedin, the village administrator, referring to the giant photo and video retail store in Manhattan whose owner and many of whose employees are members of the Satmar sect.

“I don’t want to be judgmental,” Mr. Szegedin added. “I wouldn’t call it a poor community. I would say some are deprived. I would call it a community with a lot of income-related challenges.”

Because the community typically votes as a bloc, it wields disproportionate political influence, which enables it to meet those challenges creatively. A luxurious 60-bed postnatal maternal care center was built with $10 million in state and federal grants. Mothers can recuperate there for two weeks away from their large families. Rates, which begin at $120 a day, are not covered by Medicaid, although, Mr. Szegedin said, poorer women are typically subsidized by wealthier ones.

One lawmaker, Assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun, a Republican who represents an adjacent district in Orange County, has demanded an investigation by state officials into why Kiryas Joel received grants for the center. “They may be truly poor on paper,” Ms. Calhoun said. “They are not truly poor in reality.”