Osama bin Laden killed

capital Islamabad early yesterday ending a nearly 10-year worldwide hunt for the mastermind of the September 11 attacks on New York in 2001.
US officials said bin Laden was found in a million-dollar compound in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, 60km north of Islamabad. After 40 minutes of fighting, bin Laden was among several people in the mansion killed. A source familiar with the operation said bin Laden was shot in the head.
US officials said American forces were led to the fortress-like three-story building in Abbottabad after more than four years tracking one of bin Laden’s most trusted couriers, whom US officials said was identified by men captured after the September 11 attacks.
“Detainees also identified this man as one of the few al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden. They indicated he might be living with or protected by bin Laden,” a senior administration official said in a briefing for reporters in Washington.
Reacting to the killing, the Pakistani Taliban threatened attacks against government leaders, including President Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistan army and the United States yesterday.
“Now Pakistani rulers, President Zardari and the army will be our first targets. America will be our second target,” Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Taliban Movement of Pakistan, told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.
The death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was greeted with near-silence yesterday from Gulf Arab states, including his birthplace Saudi Arabia.
By mid-afternoon, the only official comment from the Arabian Peninsula came from Yemen, bin Laden’s ancestral homeland, where an official speaking on condition of anonymity hoped the killing would “root out terrorism throughout the world”.
Saudi Arabia’s official news agency merely noted that the United States and Pakistan had announced bin Laden had been killed in a US military operation in Pakistan but gave no clue to Riyadh’s thinking.
The foreign ministers of Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, attending a meeting of Gulf foreign ministers in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi, all declined to comment on bin Laden’s death.
But personal comments were made.
“Oh God, please make this news not true . . . God curse you, Obama,” said a message on a Jihadist forum in some of the first Islamist reactions to the al Qaeda leader’s death. “Oh Americans . . . it is still legal for us to cut your necks.”
For some in the Middle East, bin Laden has been seen as the only Muslim leader to take the fight against Western dominance to the heart of the enemy. On the streets of Saudi Arabia, bin Laden’s native land which stripped him of his citizenship after Sept 11, there was a mood of disbelief and sorrow among many.
“I feel that it is a lie,” said one Saudi in Riyadh. He did not want to be named. “I don’t trust the US government or the media. They just want to be done with his story. It would be a sad thing if he really did die. I love him and in my eyes he is a hero and a jihadist.”
The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas yesterday condemned the killing by US forces of Osama bin Laden and mourned him as an “Arab holy warrior”.
“We regard this as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood,” Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip, told reporters.
Though he noted doctrinal differences between bin Laden’s al Qaeda and Hamas, Haniyeh said: “We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs.”
Bin Laden was finally found after authorities discovered in August 2010 that his courier lived with his brother and their families in an unusual and high-security building in Pakistan, officials said.
“When we saw the compound where the brothers lived, we were shocked by what we saw: an extraordinarily unique compound,” a senior administration official said.
“The bottom line of our collection and our analysis was that we had high confidence that the compound harboured a high-value terrorist target. The experts who worked this issue for years assessed that there was a strong probability that the terrorist who was hiding there was Osama bin Laden,” another administration official said.
Bin Laden and three adult men, including a son of bin Laden, were killed along with a woman who was used as a shield by a male combatant, officials said.
A US helicopter was brought down but its crew and assault force safely evacuated, officials said.
“After midnight, a large number of commandos encircled the compound. Three helicopters were hovering overhead,” said Nasir Khan, a resident of the town.
“All of a sudden there was firing towards the helicopters from the ground. There was intense firing and then I saw one of the helicopters crash,” said Khan, who had watched the dramatic scene unfold from his rooftop.
Authorities said bin Laden’s hideaway, built in 2005, was about eight times larger than other homes in the area. It had security features including 12 to 18-foot walls topped with barbed wire, internal walls for extra privacy, and access controlled through two security gates.
It had no telephone or Internet connection.
“It is not a surprise that bin Laden was captured in an urban heartland,” said Sajjan Gohel of the Asia Pacific Foundation.
“Many of al-Qaeda’s senior leaders have been captured in Pakistani cities. It had become a myth that the al Qaeda leadership were hiding in caves in the tribal areas.”
“Justice has been done,” President Barack Obama declared in a hastily called White House speech announcing the death of the elusive head of the militant Islamic group behind a series of deadly bombings across the world.
Many Americans had given up hope of finding bin Laden after he vanished in the mountains of Afghanistan in late 2001.
Intelligence that originated last August provided the clues that eventually led to bin Laden’s trail, Obama said. A US official said Obama gave the final order to pursue the operation on Friday.
“The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda and a terrorist who is responsible for the murder of thousands of men, women and children,” Obama said.
No Americans were harmed in the operation, Obama said.
Bin Laden had been hunted since he eluded US soldiers and Afghan militia forces in a large-scale assault on the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan in 2001. The trail quickly went cold after he disappeared and many intelligence officials believed he had been hiding in Pakistan.

While in hiding, bin Laden had taunted the West and advocated his militant Islamist views in videotapes spirited from his hideaway.
The dollar and stocks rose, while oil and gold fell, on the view bin Laden’s death reduced global security risks.
However, many analysts cautioned it was too soon to say his death would mark a turning point in the battle against a highly fractured network of militants.
Obama may now also find it easier to wind down the nearly decade-old war in Afghanistan, begun after the Sept 11 attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3 000.
But the operation could complicate relations with Pakistan, a key US ally in the battle against militancy and the war in Afghanistan. Those ties have already been frayed over US drone strikes in the west of the country and the six-week imprisonment of a CIA contractor earlier this year.
A US official said Pakistani authorities were told the details of the raid after it had taken place.
The revelation bin Laden was living in style will also put Pakistani officials under pressure to explain how he could have been right under their noses. Residents in Abbottabad said a Pakistani military training academy is near the compound.
“For some time there will be a lot of tension between Washington and Islamabad because bin Laden seems to have been living here close to Islamabad,” said Imtiaz Gul, a Pakistani security analyst.
Bin Laden’s death triggered a travel alert for Americans worldwide, the US State Department said, warning of the potential for anti-American violence.
Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron urged Britons to remain vigilant.
“Of course, it does not mark the end of the threat we face from extremist terror. Indeed, we will have to be particularly vigilant in the weeks ahead. But it is, I believe, a massive step forward,” Cameron said.
Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden will have to answer to God for having killed many people and exploiting religion to spread hate, the Vatican said yesterday.
Spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said that while Christians “do not rejoice” over a death, it serves to remind them of “each person’s responsibility before God and men”.
“Osama bin Laden, as everyone knows, had the grave responsibility of having spread division and hate among people, causing the deaths of an innumerable number of people and exploiting religion for these purposes,” he said.
The Vatican has often condemned the concept of violence in God’s name.
Lombardi also said the Vatican hoped that the death of bin Laden “would not be an occasion for more hate, but for peace”.
Thousands of people gathered outside the White House, waving American flags, cheering and chanting “USA, USA, USA”. Car drivers blew their horns in celebration and people streamed to Lafayette Park across from the street, as police vehicles with their lights flashing stood vigil.
Similar celebrations erupted at New York’s Ground Zero, site of the World Trade Centre twin towers felled by hijacked airplanes on Sept 11.
A market perception that the death of bin Laden reduced the security risks facing the US lifted the dollar from a three-year low and raised stock index futures.
US crude oil prices also fell. “Current oil prices are regarded by most analysts as carrying significant risk premium at current levels and good news on the geopolitical front has the potential to move prices back below $100,” said Ric Spooner, chief analyst at CMC Markets in Sydney.
Some analysts said the market impact would be short lived.
Former President George W Bush, who had vowed to bring bin Laden to justice “dead or alive”, called the operation a “momentous achievement” after Obama called him with the news.
Other experts said the killing would deal a big psychological blow to al Qaeda but may have little practical impact on an increasingly decentralised group that has operated tactically without him for years.
Al Qaeda has been hurt ideologically by uprisings in the Arab world by ordinary people seeking democracy and human rights – notions anathema to bin Laden, who once said democracy was akin to idolatry as it placed man’s desires above God’s.
“It changes little in terms of on-the-ground realities – by the time of his death bin Laden was not delivering operational or tactical orders to the numerous al Qaeda affiliates across the world,” said Rick Nelson of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Statements of appreciation poured in from both sides of Washington’s political divide. Republican Senator John McCain declared, “I am overjoyed that we finally got the world’s top terrorist.”
India said the killing underlined its concern that “terrorists belonging to different organisations find sanctuary in Pakistan,” India’s home ministry said in New Delhi.
A US official said that the retrieval of the body may help convince any doubters that bin Laden is really dead.
The US is conducting DNA testing on bin Laden and used facial recognition techniques to help identify him, the official said.
The US is ensuring that bin Laden’s body is being handled in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition, a US official said.
Besides Sept 11, Washington has also linked bin Laden to a string of attacks – including the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2000 bombing of the warship USS Cole in Yemen. – Reuters.