"Now we know his name," NPR's Dina Temple-Raston tells our Newscast desk.
Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden's "favorite courier and right-hand man," according to evidence in secret documents detailing information obtained from detainees held at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
And al-Kuwaiti, who inadvertently led the U.S. to bin Laden after his identity was discovered, died with bin Laden during Monday's raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Dina reports that:
Al-Kuwaiti was a protege of self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He taught a Guantanamo detainee who was supposed to be the 20th hijacker how to use the internet. According to that detainee, al-Kuwaiti took him to an internet cafe in Karachi and taught him to use e-mail.
E-mail, al-Kuwaiti told the detainee, was a safer way to contact 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta.
Al-Kuwaiti's name also comes up as the host at an al-Qaida guesthouse. The documents say high level al-Qaida operatives including Hambali, an Indonesian al-Qaida financier who uses just one name and is now being held at Guantanamo, came through that guesthouse.
ABC News reports that neighbors near the compound in Abbottabad says al-Kuwaiti was "a friendly man from the country's tribal areas who worked as a money changer and built 12-foot walls to keep out the 'many enemies' he [said he had] acquired in the course of doing business."
Update at 7:53 p.m. ET. Pictures Inside The Compound:
Earlier today, Reuters released pictures of the bodies of three unidentified men strewn inside what the news agency says is Osama Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound. Reuters has not reported whether the courier is among the men in the pictures.
Update at 2:40 p.m. ET, May 6:
The detainee assessment files for Hambali and Mohammed al Qahtani, the "20th hijaker," are now posted here and here.
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