Documents show 'Indian brother' donated lakhs to Osama bin Laden

United States intelligence officials on Wednesday released documents it said were recovered during the 2011 raid on the compound in Pakistan where US forces killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. (Getty Images)
A statement of accounts that is part of the Osama bin Laden documents declassified by the US intelligence shows that the Al Qaeda chief received at least two payments running into hundreds of thousands of Pakistani rupees from a man identified only as “the Indian brother in Madinah”.

The spreadsheet for receipts and expenditure for 2009 was part of more than 100 documents seized from bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad that were released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Wednesday.

There are no details about the “Indian brother” or any information in the spreadsheet that can identify him. This is probably the first time that an Al Qaeda document has identified an Indian as one of the terror network’s financiers.

According to the statement of accounts, an amount of Pakistani Rs 292,400 was received from the “Indian brother in Madinah” in May 2009. Another payment of Pakistani Rs 335,000 was received from the same man in July 2009.

A brief note related to the second payment appears to suggest that Pakistan Rs 5,000 was paid to the “messenger” who delivered the amount.

Madinah is an alternative spelling for the Saudi Arabian city of Medina, the second holiest site for Islam after Mecca. The Indian community in Saudi Arabia is 2.5 million-strong and a sizeable number of Indians live and work in Medina.

The statement of accounts shows the Al Qaeda chief received money from several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, and in various currencies, primarily Pakistani rupees but also US dollars, British pounds and Euros.

Bin Laden also received money and gold from women he identified only as “virtuous” sisters.

Other documents declassified on Wednesday show that funds received by bin Laden were distributed to several terror groups based in Pakistan, primarily the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and the Haqqani Network, which has been accused by the US of having close links with the Inter-Services Intelligence.