Did US shut down Pak electrical and comms in Abbottabad to raid bin Laden?

A very titillating tidbit is found in this ABC report:

Residents near the bin Laden compound told ABC News that just before the stealth helicopters arrived, all electricity and cellphone service was knocked out and then came back on right after the choppers left.

If true, this is a stunning report. It would indicate that US Special Operations Command has the ability to do something like an EMP - electromagnetic pulse - that is not a pulse, but a continuous, disabling stream of EM energy that can be turned on and off at will. Frankly, I'm skeptical because the power and transmission requirements for such a device would be enormous. Jamming cellphone frequencies would be of little challenge to signals specialists, but shutting down even part of an electrical grid by non-destructive, non-invasive means would be incredibly daunting.

But there are some interesting other sources: "Making sense of the Osama op through tweets."

There are also references in the tweets of a blackout in the town, roads being blocked, telephones going dead and sirens being sounded. It is not clear whether these things happened during the raid or after the US choppers had left with bin Laden's body.

Even so, the question is begged just why there was not even a Pakistani police response during the 40 minutes that US special ops were on the ground. The answer would seem to lead down two divergent trails:

1. There was secret Pakistani involvement in the raid who stopped Abbottabad authorities from responding. Regardless of what the Pak government's official, public stance is toward OBL or the raid, it may be that there was a level of cooperation that no one wants to talk about. In fact, to take this conspiracy theory all the way, might there have been a "rogue" cell within the Pak military of intelligence service that cooperated with no knowledge by, much less sanction of, the Pak government?

2. There was not near the kind of firefight that we were told took place for the first 20 minutes of the raid. Since the official account of the sequence during the raid is about on it ninety-eleventh version, we do not know how much gunfire there actually was. Was there only one of the compound's residents armed, as one report says? Whatever, the compound was not an armed camp. While there might well have been 20 minutes elapse from the first to the last shot, it's hardly likely that firing was continuous or even frequent during that time. SEALs don't shoot a lot; they don't need to. For that matter, special operators have silenced weapons that are not publicized. (In World War II, the OSS developed a pistol so silent that OSS Director Bill Donovan took it into the the Oval Office and fired several rounds into a small sandbag he had brought with him. Roosevelt, who was looking away while he dictated a letter, did not even turn around. This according to Donovan's deputy, Stanley Lovell, in his book Of Spies and Stratagems.)

The tweets from Abbottabad refer to how much noise the helicopters made in and over bin Laden's compound, although the choppers' approaches seem not to have been perceived very much. What gunfire sounds did come from the compound may have been overwhelmed by the machine noise.

Still, the lack or emergency response is more than a little curious. Forty minutes is quite enough time for at least a few police patrols to have reached the compound. Why didn't they? The US government is not asking, and the Pakistanis aren't saying.

Curiouser and curiouser.