United States President Barack Obama caught the Pakistani leaders off-guard on Monday when he announced the killing of the 9/11 terrorist attack mastermind, al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, by American forces in a “surgical strike” on a large, well-protected compound in the garrison city of Abbottabad, where the world’s most wanted man was holed-up. “Justice has been done,” the US president said in a statement the entire world waited 10 long years to hear.
US media claimed that Osama’s body was buried at sea after completing Islamic rituals. Obama praised Pakistan for its “close counter-terrorism cooperation”, but officials said the US had kept the operation secret. Bin Laden reportedly resisted the attackers and was killed in a 40-minute firefight along with three other men, his most trusted courier, who carried his messages to the outside world, and one of his sons. A woman was also killed in the operation and US officials said she had been used as a shield by one of bin Laden’s fighters, however, it was not clear whether the woman was one of bin Laden’s four wives.
The US spent years figuring out the courier’s identity and they came to know finally that he was a former protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is being held now in Guantanamo Bay. An official said US forces narrowed down the region in Pakistan where the courier was working in 2009. The courier, he said, led the US forces to the compound in Abbottabad. The compound was owned by two brothers, Arshad and Tariq, said to be from Waziristan.
After the completion of the operation, his body was taken into custody for burial. “I heard a thundering sound, followed by heavy firing. Then firing suddenly stopped,” said a local resident, Salmaan Ahmad. “Then more thundering, then a big blast,” he said. “In the morning when we went out to see what happened, some helicopter wreckage was lying in an open field,” he added. The details of the operation, including the number of US military personnel involved, remain unclear.
However, reports said the US officials would only say that Osama bin Laden “resisted” during a gun-battle. “He died from a bullet to the head,” they said, adding that he was identified by facial recognition. A Foreign Office spokesperson said President Obama had telephoned President Asif Zardari on the successful US operation, suggesting that the political leadership in Islamabad was not in the loop. The US did not notify its Pakistani allies about its plan to kill bin Laden until after its forces had left Pakistani soil, a senior US administration official said. “We shared this intelligence on the compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” the official told reporters.
Pictures on TV screens showed flames rising from what was said to be the site of bin Laden’s last stand: a building surrounded by trees and high walls. There had been years of speculation that he was hiding in the remote tribal areas of Pakistan or across the border in Afghanistan, but the town where he was found lies a short distance from Islamabad and is home to the country’s main military training institution, the Pakistan Military Academy.
It is several hundred miles from Waziristan, where the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drone strike campaign has been concentrated. “The American forces flew to his hideout in helicopters at about 1am from neighbouring Afghanistan,” said security officials in Islamabad, also claiming that Pakistan’s radar system was jammed and the choppers could not be detected. However, a Pakistani diplomat who asked not to be named said there was all likelihood that the helicopters, four in number and carrying around 20 US special troops, flew in from Ghazi base near Haripur.
He said the operation was American but Pakistan assisted in terms of authorisation of helicopter flights in its airspace. A Pakistani intelligence official said that one of the four US helicopters was brought down by the militants present with Osama in the compound. The diplomat said the US forces took no time to transport the body away from Pakistani soil for burial at sea, as the American authorities did not want an accessible gravesite that they feared would become a shrine for Al Qaeda chief’s followers. The US authorities had offered the body to the Saudi government, but it refused to accept it.
US officials meanwhile said that DNA testing on bin Laden’s corpse before it was buried at sea confirmed the identity of the world’s most wanted terrorist. “Bin Laden’s DNA has been matched to several family members. And there is at least 99 percent certainty that the DNA matches that of Osama Bin Laden,” an official told AFP. However, the US may have to release photographs of bin Laden’s corpse to smother any effort to claim he survived the raid, top US lawmakers warned.
The fact that Bin Laden was killed in an urban area of Pakistan will raise questions about how the six-foot-four fugitive, one of the most famous faces in the world, managed to survive there for so long. Obama said he had directed US armed forces to attack the heavily-fortified compound in Abbottabad after a tip-off that first emerged last August. Obama used the occasion to “reaffirm that the United States is not – and never will be – at war with Islam”. “I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11 that our war is not against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims.
Indeed, Al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own, so his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity,” he said. Officials said they were stunned when intelligence reports first revealed the elaborate security at the compound where bin Laden was hiding, with 12-18 foot high walls topped with barbed wire. Leaders in both Afghanistan and India pointed the finger at Pakistan, saying that bin Laden’s discovery and death so close to Islamabad vindicated their claims of double-dealing by their nuclear-armed neighbour.
George W Bush, who was US president at the time of the 9/11 attacks, said bin Laden’s death was a “victory for America” and congratulated Obama and US intelligence and military forces. French President Nicolas Sarkozy congratulated the United States for its “tenacity” in hunting down bin Laden and British Prime Minister David Cameron said his death would bring “great relief” to people worldwide. No prisoners were taken in the raid, a senior defense official said, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation updated its “most wanted terrorists” list within hours of bin Laden’s death, slapping a red banner under his picture with the word “Deceased”.
An Internet outlet for official messages from Al Qaeda accepted its leader’s killing, monitoring group SITE said. The US government warned that bin Laden’s death at the hands of US forces could trigger retaliatory attacks in the US and Europe, and against Western targets around the world. Nominated CIA chief General David Petraeus and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen telephoned Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Kayani and ISI chief Lt Gen Shuja Pasha and discussed with them a host of issues following bin Laden’s killing, Online news agency reported. British Prime Minister David Cameron also called Prime Minister Gilani on the phone to discuss the operation.
