Osama Bin Laden Town Gets 19 Million Euro Amusement Park, Over $25 Million in Funds
Pakistan will develop a 19 million euro, 50-acre riverside amusement park on the edge of Abbottabad, where U.S. NAVY SEALS shot al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in 2011, The Telegraph reported Monday.
The development will include restaurants, a heritage center and artificial waterfalls. The government of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province hopes the park will boost tourism but denied it was intended to improve the town's public image after the bin Laden raid on May 2, 2011, according to the news report.
"The amusement city will be built on 50 acres in the first phase but later will be extended to 500 acres," Syed Aqil Shah, the provincial minister for tourism and sports, said. "It will have a heritage park, wildlife zoo, food street, adventure and paragliding clubs, waterfalls and jogging tracks."
Work on the development will begin late February or early March, Shah added, and will take eight years to complete. Funds for the project add up to almost $30 million.
Bin Laden founded the jihadist organization al-Qaeda that claimed responsibility for the Sept. 11, attacks in New York City, along with others.
The bin Laden raid was recreated for the 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty by director Kathryn Bigelow. The movie chronicled the hunt for the al-Qaeda terrorist leader after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and his death at the hands of the Navy SEALS Team 6. The film starred Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton and Chris Pratt. Chastain, who played a relentless CIA agent in the movie, won a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture-Drama and the film is up for five nominations at the Academy Awards on Feb. 24.
Ex-CIA agent Leon Panetta, who oversaw the raid that killed bin Laden, called Zero Dark Thirty a "good movie" and an accurate portrayal of the work that went into hunting down and capturing the wanted terrorist. He added the following:
"I think people ought to make their own judgments. There are parts of it that give you a good sense of how the intelligence operations do work. But I also think people in the end have to understand that it isn't a documentary, it's a movie."
