Cemetery or park: what to do with Bin Laden's house?

Cemetery or playground? In Pakistan, army and local authorities have generated controversy by presenting different projects to the place where Osama Bin Laden died at the hands of a command of US elite forces in May 2011.

The army lifted a wall around the plot of about 350 square meters in the town of Abbottabad, 50 kilometers north of Islamabad, which was the fortified residence of the head of the Islamic Al-Qaeda.

The purpose of the armed forces was to turn it into a cemetery, but the provincial government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which regained ground after the death of Bin Laden, is opposed to the necropolis project and want to build a playground.

"We protect this enclave of a usurpation building a wall and now we want to make it a cemetery as there is a real problem of lack of cemeteries in the region," he told AFP Zylfiqar Ali Bhutto, vice president of the military barracks of Abbottabad.

An official of the provincial government, Mushtaq Ghani, in turn, declared that it was impossible to create "a cemetery in the middle of the residences."

"The government wants to create a playground. If we find funding, we can transform this space into a playground this year," he added.

Bhutto indicated that both parties will meet next week to try to reach a solution.

After the death of Bin Laden, who represented the success of US President Barack Obama policy, the Pakistani authorities demolished the house of Al-Qaeda chief and left the enclave unusable.