Bulldozers have razed to the ground the three-storey home in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden lived for at least five years until he was killed by US special forces last May.
Only the wall of the compound remained intact, obscuring the debris of the house in the garrison town of Abbottabad where the al-Qaeda chief hid with his three wives and nine children, 50km from the capital.
Officials were reluctant for the site to become a shrine and the house was pulled down two months before the first anniversary of the secret US Navy SEAL raid that has been described as the Pakistan army's biggest humiliation.
The fact that Bin Laden lived so long just a kilometre from the country's premier military academy exposed the powerful military to charges of complicity or incompetence and dealt a massive blow to Pakistan-US relations.
"The demolition has been completed, the three-storey building was razed to the ground," a security official said.
"We have been ordered to be deployed here until further instructions. The outer wall will remain intact for the moment and we don't know the plan for the future. First we will remove the debris."
Bulldozers began the demolition work late Saturday in Abbottabad's Bilal Town, which was propelled from a quiet suburb to international notoriety after the al-Qaeda leader was killed on 2 May, 2011.
The debris from the flattened house was invisible from street level, hidden behind the 18-foot-high boundary wall of the compound.
But from the rooftops of surrounding houses, heaps of bricks, concrete slabs, twisted steel, broken wooden doors, a brown steel gate and two black plastic water tanks could be seen alongside two parked bulldozers.
"We found nothing in the building. Everything had already been taken away by the investigation experts," the security official said.
The compound has been closely guarded by Pakistani security officials since the decisive US operation. Journalists in particular have been heavily restricted from visiting the site.
The Americans buried Bin Laden's body at sea, determined that no grave act as a memorial to the mastermind of the 11 September, 2001.
