Three Osama Bin Laden Wives in Pakistani Custody
Al Qaeda leader confined himself to two rooms and had not left in five years.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, May 5, 2011 -- Pakistani intelligence agents today are interrogating three women -- all wives of Osama bin Laden -- who were captured during the U.S.-led raid on Sunday.
The wives, including the youngest -- 29-year-old Yemeni Amal Ahmed Abdul Fatah -- were all living with bin Laden inside the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
According to one of the women, bin Laden confined himself to two rooms in the house, including the bedroom where he was killed. He never left those rooms, she claims, for the five years he was hiding there.
"He used two rooms on one of the floors," Asad Munir, a former ISI commander, told ABC News. "He never went anywhere."
The three wives are in custody in Islamabad, and are facing firm but nonviolent questioning, a former intelligence official said.
"We give them a questionnaire, with 20 questions," Munir said. "We change the order of questions every three or four days."
Investigators then look for any differences in the answers.
"For telling lies you have to have very good memory," Munir said. "There's a way to find out. No one will tell you the first day the correct answer."
U.S. officials have requested but have been denied access to the wives so far.
Officials also have in custody bin Laden's 13-year-old daughter, who saw her father killed "in front of her eyes," a senior Pakistani security official told ABC News in an exclusive interview Wednesday.
They are also questioning six or seven other children who were captured in the raid.
Watch "KILL SHOT: THE STORY BEHIND BIN LADEN'S DEATH," a special "20/20" Friday at 10 p.m. ET.
Pakistani officials said they gave the CIA intelligence that eventually helped lead it to bin Laden's compound. It was a phone call the agency intercepted from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia in which the caller used keywords that raised suspicions he was discussing bin Laden.
When the caller used the phone again in 2009, the Pakistanis say they tracked his signal and briefly picked him up, and then they shared the phone's SIM card with U.S. officials. The man using the phone was bin Laden's trusted courier, who eventually led U.S. intelligence officials inadvertently to the compound.
The reports come as relations between the United States and Pakistan grow increasingly tense. The U.S. intelligence community kept Pakistani officials in the dark until after the top-secret mission to hunt down bin Laden was finished, worried that the information could leak.
The Pakistani army has suffered a major blow to its credibility -- at home for its inability to detect U.S. planes in its airspace through the 40-minute mission, and abroad for not finding bin Laden, who was hiding only steps away from one of the country's top military academies.
In his first public statement since the operation, Pakistan's army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani today warned that "violating the sovereignty of Pakistan will warrant a review on the level of military/intelligence cooperation with the United States."
He also said that U.S. military personnel in Pakistan would be reduced to the "minimum essential."
There are currently about 100 U.S. troops in Pakistan.
This is not the first time Pakistan has threatened to cut U.S. forces on the ground. A report published a month ago, following the case of CIA contractor Raymond Davis who allegedly shot and killed two Pakistani men, stated that Pakistanis wanted to cut the U.S. trainer force by 30 percent.