NEW YORK: Documents seized by US special forces personnel during the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan have revealed that Al Qaeda leaders were increasingly worried about spies in their group, drones patrolling the skies and secret devices tracking their movements, according to translations released by intelligence agencies to the ABC television and Reuters news agency.

In one of the declassified documents, Bin Laden outlines how at least $29 million stashed in Sudan should be apportioned after his death, requesting that most of it be used to continue global “jihad”.

He sets down specific amounts in Saudi riyals and gold that should be apportioned between his mother, a son, a daughter, an uncle, and his uncle’s children and maternal aunts. He then writes: “I hope for my brothers, sisters and maternal aunts to obey my will and to spend all the money that I have left in Sudan on jihad, for the sake of Allah.”

The document — part of a cache of 113 documents — has been described by intelligence officials as Bin Laden’s will.

The documents are mostly dated between 2009 and 2011 and comprise the second cache from the raid to have been declassified.

Agencies add: In one document, Bin Laden issues instructions to Al Qaeda members holding an Afghan hostage to be wary of possible tracking technology attached to the ransom payment.

“It is important to get rid of the suitcase in which the funds are delivered, due to the possibility of it having a tracking chip in it,” he states in a letter to an aide identified only as “Shaykh Mahmud”.

In an apparent reference to armed US drones patrolling the skies, he says his negotiators should not leave their rented house in Peshawar “except on a cloudy overcast day”. While the document is undated, the hostage, Afghan diplomat Abdul Khaliq Farahi, was held from September 2008 to late 2010.

Another, fragmentary document acknowledges that Al Qaeda executed four would-be volunteers on suspicion of spying, only to discover they were probably innocent, according to senior US intelligence officials authorised to discuss the materials in advance of their public release.

“I did not mention this to justify what has happened,” wrote the undated letter’s unidentified author, adding: “We are in an intelligence battle and humans are humans and no one is infallible.”

In a May 11, 2010 letter to his then second-in-command, Atiyah Abd al Rahman, Bin Laden urged caution in arranging an interview with Al Jazeera journalist Ahmad Zaidan, asserting that the United States could be tracking his movements through devices implanted in his equipment, or by satellite.

“You must keep in mind the possibility, however, slight, that journalists can be under surveillance that neither we nor they can perceive, either on the ground or via satellite,” he wrote.

Published in Dawn, March 2nd, 2016