By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 27, 1998; Page A28

KHARTOUM, Sudan—The people who lived around Osama bin Laden during his years in Khartoum did not lay eyes on him often.

The man accused of being the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism lived during the early 1990s in a house surrounded by a high wall. The wall was roughly the sort that surrounds most of the houses in the nominally upscale Riyad neighborhood, except for all the barbed wire. The house beyond it stands either three or four stories high -- it's hard to tell because of the wall -- and if it mostly resembles an apartment building, it may be because when bin Laden lived in Khartoum, he had either three or four wives. The neighbors are not quite sure.

What they remember vividly, however, is how involved it was to pay a simple social call at the big house on the corner. The homes of Khartoum are, behind their walls, almost always open. Children wander in and out. Visitors drop by unannounced.

"But here, no," said Amar Osman, with a nod to the vacant fortress, just off a busy road near the airport. "If you want to visit bin Laden's women or family, first you contact them and say you want to visit. And then the time."

Osman's mother went to the trouble only once that he knows of. "Unusual for the Sudanese culture and the Sudanese nature to do this," Osman observed.

Also unusual were the men standing outside the house with guns.

"Saudi, Yemeni, Palestinian. But I hadn't seen Sudanese with him," Osman said. There were more of them in the tall house the color of chocolate on the next block. It was known as the bin Laden guest house, although some of the guests appeared to be essentially permanent.

Osman, who lives just down the road, remembers seeing bin Laden himself only once. It was at the local mosque.

Usually, the mysterious neighbor ventured out only behind the heavily tinted windows of a black Toyota Land Cruiser, routinely preceded and followed by vehicles with windows just as dark. Where the motorcade went, no one could say. Perhaps to offices of the businesses the multimillionaire owned in Sudan and is said to maintain interests in -- the construction company that built much of the highway to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, the nearby White Nile Tannery where the skins of goats and cattle become leather, the export company, the investment firm. . . .

Or perhaps bin Laden was en route to his land a couple of miles south of the Sudanese capital. Locals refer to the acres, in an area called Soba, as farms. But "no one knows what happens in his farms," said Mohanad Osman, 21.

"You can't get in," said his brother Amar, 26. "Now the security members -- the government -- owns this farm."

But if the Saudi-born terrorist and his guests stood out from the local population, no one took exceptional notice until the day the '81 Toyota HiLux pickup showed up. Mohanad was playing soccer in the street at the time. It was about 4 p.m., and he was 18, which would make the year 1995. The pickup spun around the corner and braked in front of the guest house. Inside were three or four men with Kalashnikovs. They opened fire on the front of the guest house. The front of the guest house returned fire.

In the next block, firing erupted from bin Laden's own house. Mohanad, watching over the ledge of the wall, saw a man firing from the roof. One man lay dead in the crossroads. Two or three others died in the guest house, the Osman brothers recalled. They said three of the four men in the pickup died at the scene. The fourth, they said, was captured by Sudanese police and, eventually, hanged.

Bullet holes are still visible in the steel gate of bin Laden's house. Bits of the brick wall beside it have been blown away. Another neighbor, who does not speak English, pantomimes the battle. He pulls his hand down his chin: The men had beards.

"After that action, bin Laden closed the road," Amar Osman said. Trenches were dug at either end of the street in front of his house, closing the block to all but pedestrian access -- and after midnight, even pedestrians were stopped, questioned and searched, the Osmans said. A partial barricade went up on the side street that entered the block opposite bin Laden's house, reducing access to a single lane. You could get in but not out.

It was a shrewd bit of road design by bin Laden, who has a degree in civil engineering from King Abdul Aziz University in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. Just down the street, Amar Osman had just finished work on a civil engineering degree of his own. The neighbors never got around to discussing shared interests.

"When you see someone who is always carrying weapons, you don't want to talk with him," Osman said.