U.S. Still Waits for Access to Bin Laden Widows

Pakistan has not yet allowed American investigators access to the widows, nor shared their own interrogation report, a Pakistani security official said Tuesday. The official was speaking on condition of anonymity in keeping with the rules of his organization.

The Obama administration demanded access to the women, who appear to have been in hiding with Bin Laden for years, and an American official said that Pakistan had promised to comply.

Yet the women may not prove to be the mine of information that some suppose because they led such cloistered lives, officials and analysts say. In line with the strict code of Islam followed by Bin Laden, they never met men outside their immediate family and were not informed by Bin Laden of any of his business or operational dealings.

The widows, along with the Pakistani wife of Bin Laden’s trusted courier, and a number of children detained at the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad remain in the hands of the Pakistani security forces, who have controlled the flow of information about them.

There are conflicting reports as to how many there are and who they are. Initial reports indicated that 12 women and children were in the compound; it now appears that there were as many as 17.

Some information given by intelligence officials appears intended to cast doubt on the account of the raid as presented by American officials; none has been independently verified.

Pakistani security officials, asking to remain anonymous, say that along with the widows — two from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen — there were 13 children, 8 of them related to Bin Laden.

The fourth woman, a Pakistani who was wounded in the raid, indicated to officials who first arrived at the compound that her husband had been killed, said Asad Munir, a retired brigadier and former intelligence service official. Her husband appears to have been Arshad Khan, Bin Laden’s trusted courier, who owned the compound and protected him for more than five years.

Bin Laden’s widows have been identified as Um Hamza, or Mother of Hamza, whose real name is Khairiah Sabar, and is from Jidda in Saudi Arabia; Um Khalid, or Mother of Khalid, whose name is Siham, and is from Medina in Saudi Arabia; and the youngest, a Yemeni, Amal al-Saddah, 29. Her passport names her as Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah.

Bin Laden’s daughter with Ms. Saddah, Safia, who is 12 or 13 years old, is also reported to have been present and even to have witnessed the shooting of her father. Officials have also said that there is a 5-year-old son of Bin Laden and that four of the children are his grandchildren by a daughter killed in an airstrike in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

One of his sons was killed in the raid, but reports have named him variously as Hamza or Khalid, both of whom were born in the same year from different wives and would be 22 years old.

Bin Laden has been married five times, according to a book, “Growing Up bin Laden,” written by his fourth son, Omar bin Laden, in collaboration with the American author Jean Sasson and his mother, Najwa bin Laden, Bin Laden’s first wife and cousin.

In answers to e-mailed questions forwarded by Ms. Sasson, Omar bin Laden said his father kept his wives, and often his children, sequestered in the house.

His mother, Najwa, would sneak into the garden when Osama bin Laden was away, warning the children not to tell their father she had dared step outside the house. The children, too, rarely were permitted to go outside. Omar bin Laden said his saddest memories were of being locked in their home in Jidda and staring out at all the other children who were allowed to play.

Najwa and Omar had long wondered whether Osama bin Laden’s two Saudi wives were with him in hiding, and only from reports of the American assault undertaken by a Navy Seals team did they learn that they were. Omar said he was sad that his half-brother Khalid was killed in the raid, though he said he had little in common with Khalid and had seen him rarely.

Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Scott Shane from Washington.

 

Audit Finds Long Waits for Breast Exams

The audit examined waiting times at nine health care facilities in the 2009 fiscal year and found that the worst were at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, where women had to wait 148 calendar days for routine screening mammograms and 50 working days for diagnostic mammograms, when cancer is suspected.

John C. Liu, the city comptroller, said in a statement accompanying the audit that the long waiting times “placed women in jeopardy” and violated the city’s policies, which recommend waits of no more than two weeks for routine screening.

He said women who had to wait long times for appointments were more likely to miss them.

Ana Marengo, a spokeswoman for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs the public health system, said that the comptroller’s data was outdated and that high-risk patients at its hospitals received mammograms within 24 to 72 hours.

“If there is a lump, if there is a family history, if there is a high-risk individual that had cancer before, all those are considered urgent,” and the patient would be seen within 72 hours, Ms. Marengo said. She conceded that “two years ago, the wait time was longer,” and that even now, in cases in which the risk of cancer was considered lower, the wait could still be longer.

At Elmhurst, she said, the wait as of December 2010 was 20 days for screening and 23 days for a general diagnostic test, as opposed to an urgent one.

At Queens Hospital Center, the wait for a screening test was 56 days in December, Ms. Marengo said. “It’s due to volume and higher demand,” she said. “We only have a certain amount of resources.”

The audit found that the longest waits for diagnostic tests were at Bellevue Hospital Center, with 17 working days; Gouverneur Healthcare Services, with 20; Kings County Hospital Center, with 21; Woodhull Medical Center, with 28; and Elmhurst, with 50.

For screening tests, the longest waits were 41 calendar days at Woodhull in Brooklyn, 49 days at Queens, and 148 days at Elmhurst.

Elmhurst Hospital conducted the most mammograms, 11,425, and Queens was second, with 10,544, the comptroller said.

Last year, public hospitals performed 100,000 mammograms systemwide, up from about 92,000 in 2009, Ms. Marengo said.