Today, the seven asylum seekers, all members of an extended family who have been living underground in China since 1999, remained sequestered in the United Nations office in a compound owned by the Chinese government.

Hadda was also the site of a farming compound owned by Yunis Khalis, which bin Laden visited.

It occupies an entire block in a 22-acre compound owned by the Menil Foundation in Montrose, an old, unfancy neighborhood of Houston.

They would work out of the comfortable Venice, Calif., compound owned by Joe Pytka, the independent television-commercial director who did the John Hancock commercials.

Mr. Gamas, the leading member of the local community, led a visitor around the five-bedroom, hilltop villa that he is building for his family, next to a sprawling, ornate compound owned by his father.

He lives with his best friend and "kinakapatid" Godo in the duplex that is in a compound owned by Don Berto Makunatan a.k.a. Babsy.

These locomotives, known as the "Dovregubben" (Dovre Giants), were the only true compounds owned by the NSB.

In one tidy compound, owned by a family named Jiang, bags of dirty medical waste are the raw material of a business that nets $5,000 a year.

The second compound, owned by Altiya Musbah al-Jarud, was hit minutes later.

The report said that some of the mortars, traced to Guinea, a recipient of American military aid, landed in a compound owned by the United States Embassy, where about 20,000 people displaced by the fighting had sought refuge.