With the anniversary of the raid that killed Bin Laden coming up in early May, he added, “the Pakistanis really don’t want to have all this attention around it.”

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, predicted that the house’s destruction would not affect efforts to rekindle relations between the United States and Pakistan, which have been virtually frozen since an American airstrike killed 24 Pakistani troops near the Afghan border in November.

Described as an “extraordinarily unique” house worth $1 million by a senior Obama administration official in the hours after the May 2 raid, the house turned out to be a more modest and cramped building. Pakistani investigators counted 27 people, including 16 children and Bin Laden’s three wives, living in the 10-room main house and the 3-room guesthouse. Bin Laden, who had a $25 million American bounty on his head, moved into the house after it was completed in 2005 under the supervision of two Pakistani brothers who appeared to have been in charge of his security. One of the men, Arshad Khan, known to United States intelligence as “the courier,” purchased the property from a local doctor between 2004 and 2005 for $48,000, property records showed.

The Qaeda leader was eventually joined there by his three wives, the youngest of whom, Amal Ahmed al-Sadah of Yemen, gave birth to two children while living in the compound, a former Pakistani military official said. The three women are currently in the custody of Pakistani intelligence, and have been interviewed by American officials.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who was the C.I.A. director at the time of the raid, publicly raised questions recently about why the Pakistani authorities had failed to detect the presence of the Qaeda leader. “It was the largest compound in the area,” he told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in an interview broadcast last month. “So, you would have thought that somebody would have asked the question, ‘What the hell’s going on there?’ ”