Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the world’s most wanted man, has been killed in a U. S. operation in north-western Pakistan, Pres. Barack Obama has announced.
“Justice has been done,” the U. S. president said in a statement that America has been waiting a decade to hear. A U. S. official said Bin Laden had already been buried at sea.
U. S. special forces launched a helicopter-borne assault on a closely guarded compound in Abbottabad, 30 miles north-east of Islamabad, on Sunday night, Pres. Obama and U. S. officials said.
Bin Laden resisted the attackers and was killed along with three other men in a firefight. The operation lasted 40 minutes. The dead included Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, who carried his messages to the outside world, and one of Bin Laden’s sons, according to reports.
A woman also died, according to some reports. It is not clear whether she was one of Bin Laden’s four wives.
U. S. forces “took custody” of Bin Laden’s body, Pres. Obama said in a televised statement from the White House. Bin Laden had been buried at sea, the AP news agency reported. Senior administration officials said the body would be handled according to Islamic practice and tradition. That practice calls for burial within 24 hours.
Pictures on the Pakistani TV station Express 24/7 showed flames rising from what is 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 Bin Laden was hiding in the remote tribal areas of Pakistan or across the border in Afghanistan. But the town where he was found, Kakul, lies a short distance from Islamabad and is home to the country’s main military training institution, the Pakistan Military Academy.
The fact that Bin Laden was killed in a 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.
Pres. Obama praised Pakistan for its “close counter-terrorism co-operation”. But officials said the US was the only country that knew in advance of the operation.
An official with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence declined to comment other than to say that it was a “highly sensitive intelligence operation.”
The dramatic news closes one chapter in the global turmoil sparked by the September 11 attacks on America that killed 3,000 people in 2001. The event triggered the war in Afghanistan, was used as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq and inflicted grievous damage on America’s moral authority after the CIA torture of al-Qaida suspects and the detention of more than 700 people at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.
