BBC News - Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda leader, dead - Barack Obama
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Osama Bin Laden Dead Body Pictures / Pics / Images / Photos: Osama bin Laden, the glowering mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed thousands of Americans, was killed in an operation led by the United States, President Barack Obama said on Sunday. ( Read: Osama: 9/11 author who defied Bush, Obama )
Bin Laden was top of the US "most wanted" list
Osama Bin Laden Dead Body Pictures / Pics
Osama Bin Laden Dead Body Pictures / Pics / Images / Photos: Osama bin Laden, the glowering mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed thousands of Americans, was killed in an operation led by the United States, President Barack Obama said on Sunday. ( Read: Osama: 9/11 author who defied Bush, Obama )"Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaida, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children," Obama said in a surprise late night White House address.
The world’s most wanted man had been killed in a Pakistani compound in an operation on Sunday, which had been carried after cooperation from Islamabad, the US leader said.
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Bin Laden was shot dead at a compound near Islamabad, in a ground operation based on US intelligence, the first lead for which emerged last August.
Mr Obama said US forces took possession of the body after "a firefight".
Bin Laden is believed to have ordered the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 and a number of others.
He was top of the US' "most wanted" list.
DNA tests later confirmed that Bin Laden was dead, the Associated Press news agency reports, quoting Obama administration officials.
Announcing the success of the operation, Mr Obama said it was "the most significant achievement to date in our nation's effort to defeat al-Qaeda".
The US has put its embassies around the world on alert, warning Americans of the possibility of al-Qaeda reprisal attacks for Bin Laden's killing.
CIA director Leon Panetta said al-Qaeda would "almost certainly" try to avenge the death of Bin Laden.
Crowds gathered outside the White House in Washington DC, chanting "USA, USA" after the news broke.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the operation sent a signal to the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"You cannot wait us out, you cannot defeat us, but you can make the choice to abandon al-Qaeda and participate in a peaceful political process," she said.
And she said there was "no better rebuke to al-Qaeda and its heinous ideology" than the peaceful uprisings across the Arab world against authoritarian governments.
A US official quoted by the Associated Press news agency said Bin Laden's body had been buried at sea, although this has not been confirmed.
Compound raidedBin Laden approved the 9/11 attacks in which nearly 3,000 people died.
He evaded the forces of the US and its allies for almost a decade, despite a $25m (£15m) bounty on his head.
Mr Obama said he had been briefed last August on a possible lead to Bin Laden's whereabouts. He authorised the operation last week once he determined there was enough intelligence to take action.
"It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground," Mr Obama said.
Bin Laden was top of the US "most wanted" listOn Sunday, US forces said to be from the elite Navy Seal Team Six undertook the operation in Abbottabad, 100km (62 miles) north-east of Islamabad.
US officials said Bin Laden was shot in the head after resisting.
Mr Obama said "no Americans were harmed".
US media reports said that the body was buried at sea to conform with Islamic practice of a burial within 24 hours and to prevent any grave becoming a shrine.
Giving more details of the raid, one senior US official said a small US team conducted the attack in about 40 minutes.
Three other men - one of Bin Laden's sons and two couriers - were killed in the raid, the official said, adding that one woman was also killed when she was used as "a shield" and two other women were injured.
One helicopter was lost due to "technical failure". The team destroyed it and left in its other aircraft.
One resident, Nasir Khan, told Reuters the helicopters had come under "intense firing" from the ground.
The size and complexity of the structure in Abbottabad "shocked" US officials.
It was surrounded by 4m-6m (12ft-18ft) walls, was eight times larger than other homes in the area and was valued at "a million dollars", though it had no telephone or internet connection.
The US official said that intelligence had been tracking a "trusted courier" of Bin Laden for many years. The courier's identity was discovered four years ago, his area of operation two years ago and then, last August, his residence in Abbottabad was found, triggering the start of the mission.
Another senior US official said that no intelligence had been shared with any country, including Pakistan, ahead of the raid.
"Only a very small group of people inside our own government knew of this operation in advance," the official said.
The Abbottabad residence is just a few hundred metres from the Pakistan Military Academy - the country's equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst.
The BBC's Aleem Maqbool in Abbottabad says it will undoubtedly be a huge embarrassment to Pakistan that Bin Laden was found not only in the country, but also on the doorstep of the military academy.
He says residents in the town were stunned the al-Qaeda leader had been living in their midst.
The senior US official said the "the loss of Bin Laden puts the group on a path of decline that will be difficult to reverse".
Bin Laden's probable successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was "far less charismatic and not as well respected within the organisation", according to reports from captured al-Qaeda operatives, the official said.
However, the root causes of radical Islam - the range of issues that enabled al-Qaeda to recruit disaffected young Muslims to its cause - remain, for the most part, unaddressed, Islamic affairs analyst Roger Hardy told the BBC.
"The death of Bin Laden will strike at the morale of the global jihad, but is unlikely to end it," he warned.
'Momentous achievement'World leaders welcomed the news of Bin Laden's death.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Bin Laden had "paid for his actions".
Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said the killing was a "great victory" but added that he "didn't know the details" of the US operation.
Former US President George W Bush described the news as a "momentous achievement".
"The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done," Mr Bush said in a statement.
But a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban threatened revenge attacks against the "American and Pakistani governments and their security forces".
And Pakistan's former President Pervez Musharraf called the operation a violation of sovereignty, telling the BBC the operation "should have been carried out by Pakistani troops".
"Although what has happened is good, I do not expect Pakistani people to be happy at the way our sovereignty was violated," he told the BBC Urdu service.
In Gaza, which is governed by militant group Hamas, Prime Minister Ismail Haniya condemned the killing of "a Muslim and Arabic warrior".
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says that, to many in the West, Bin Laden became the embodiment of global terrorism, but to others he was a hero, a devout Muslim who fought two world superpowers in the name of jihad.
The son of a wealthy Saudi construction family, Bin Laden grew up in a privileged world. But soon after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan he joined the mujahideen there and fought alongside them with his Arab followers, a group that later formed the nucleus for al-Qaeda.
After declaring war on America in 1998, Bin Laden is widely believed to have been behind the bombings of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and the attacks on New York and Washington.
AP Photo
President Obama announced on May 1 that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan, nearly 10 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. While the dramatic East Wing announcement marked the fulfillment of President George W. Bush's vow to capture the Al Qaeda leader "dead or alive," the cascade of conflicts around the globe that the attacks prompted represent his still-raging legacy.
Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that American military and C.I.A. operatives had finally cornered Bin Laden and shot him to death at a compound in Pakistan.
“For over two decades, Bin Laden has been Al Qaeda’s leader and symbol,” the president said in a statement carried on television around the world. “The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al Qaeda. But his death does not mark the end of our effort.” He added, “We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad.”
Bin Laden escaped from American troops in the mountains of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in 2001 and, although he was widely believed to be in Pakistan, American intelligence had largely lost his trail for most of the years that followed. They picked up a fresh trail last August. Mr. Obama said in his national address that it had taken months to firm up that information and that he had determined it was clear enough to authorize a secret operation in Pakistan in the week before it was launched.
The forces attacked the compound in what Mr. Obama called a “targeted operation” that left Bin Laden dead. “No Americans were harmed,” Mr. Obama said. “They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”
President Obama noted that the operation that had killed Bin Laden was carried out with the cooperation of Pakistani officials. But a senior American official and a Pakistani intelligence official said that Pakistani officials had not been informed of the operation in advance.
The fact that Bin Laden was killed deep inside Pakistan was bound once again to raise questions about just how much Pakistan is willing to work with the United States, since Pakistani officials denied for years that Mr. bin Laden was in their country. It also raised the question of whether Bin Laden’s whereabouts were known to Pakistan’s spy agency.
It was surprising that Bin Laden was killed not in Pakistan’s remote tribal area, where Bin Laden was long rumored to have taken refuge, but rather in in the city of Abbottadad, about an hour’s drive drive north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
For years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the name of Al Qaeda and the fame of Bin Laden spread like a 21st-century political plague. Groups calling themselves Al Qaeda, or acting in the name of its cause, attacked American troops in Iraq, bombed tourist spots in Bali and blew up passenger trains in Spain.
But to this day, the precise reach of his power remains unknown: how many members Al Qaeda could truly count on; how many countries its cells had penetrated; and whether, as Bin Laden boasted, he sought to arm Al Qaeda with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
And the most devastating blow to Al Qaeda may not be the death of its founder, but its slide toward irrelevance as the youth of the Arab world take to the streets to push for democracy, not the Islamic caliphate that was Bin Laden's goal.
Background
The first mention of Bin Laden in The New York Times came deep within a 1994 story on Algeria, which described him as "a wealthy Saudi financier who bankrolls Islamic militant groups from Algeria to Saudi Arabia." Two years later, the paper devoted more than 3,000 words to an article about the role of wealthy Saudi businessmen in financing terrorism that focused in large part on Bin Laden. "Officials in several countries, including the United States, say Bin Laden's money, as well as money he has raised, paid for terrorist acts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East against Americans and other Westerners," the article said. Still, he remained little known to the general public until the bombings of embassies in Africa in 1998 and of the destroyer the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 established him and his group, Al Qaeda, as the preeminent terrorist threat to American interests.
By now, of course, Bin Laden's life story is all too well known: his childhood in one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest families, his decision to join the Islamic resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the growth of Al Qaeda; the failed American attempts to kill him in the late 1990's; his backing of a plot hatched by a lieutenant, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, that grew into the Sept. 11th attacks; his escape from Tora Bora in the mountains of eastern Afghanistanafter an American invasion routed the Taliban, his protectors; his success at evading capture ever since. While in hiding, Bin Laden occasionally issued new threats against the United States.
Messages from an Unknown Location
Since escaping American troops in late 2001, Bin Laden issued some 30 messages, in audio, video or electronic text. Intelligence officials believe they were passed from hand to hand repeatedly to obscure any trail back to his hiding place.
Nearly a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bin Laden remained a potent symbolic figure. But American officials believed, based on intercepted communications from second- and third-tier Qaeda operatives, that he also was still helping to shape Al Qaeda’s strategy.
Analysts studied the rambling messages for clues to his whereabouts, and the releases gave clues about what Bin Laden was reading and thinking. The pronouncements sometimes bragged of past plots or warned of new ones, and most attracted only fleeting media attention. His less menacing comments, like an October 2010 missive calling for disaster relief to Pakistan, appeared intended to show that his concerns extended beyond scheming violence against those he saw as enemies of Islam.
Wherever he hid, he followed the news closely. A 2007 message carped that Democratic control of Congress had not ended the war in Iraq (he blamed “big corporations”), complained that the Bush administration was not moving against global warming and commended the writings of Noam Chomsky, the leftist professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In eight messages in 2009, he remarked on the tensions between Georgia and Russia, recommended Jimmy Carter’s book supportingPalestinian rights and cited two American professors’ book criticizing the pro-Israel lobby.
His mention of a book said to be by a former Central Intelligence Agency officer that Bin Laden called “The Apology of a Hired Killer” set off a guessing game — including at the C.I.A. — for which of several books with similar titles he might have in mind.
A January 2010 message discussed climate change, even referring by last name to James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist who has warned of global warming. In March, in a brief statement directed to Americans, he warned that executing Khalid Shaikh Mohammedand other prisoners accused of planning the Sept. 11 attacks would prompt Al Qaeda to kill any Americans in its custody.
