Tuesday 3 May 2011

Bin Laden 'was shot unarmed' - US

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The BBC's Orla Guerin looks around the perimeter of Bin Laden's compound
Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was unarmed when he was killed by US troops on Sunday after resisting capture, the White House has said.
Meanwhile, the CIA has said it did not tell Pakistan about the operation for fear the Pakistanis would leak information and jeopardise the mission.
Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, says it is embarrassed by its failures on Bin Laden.
The Pakistani government denies any prior knowledge of the raid.
Bin Laden, aged 54, was the founder and leader of al-Qaeda. He is believed to have ordered the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, as well as a number of other deadly bombings.
Al-Qaeda clues White House spokesman Jay Carney said Bin Laden's wife "rushed" the first US assaulter who entered the room where they were, and was shot in the leg but not killed. On Monday, White House officials said the woman was killed in the firefight after Bin Laden used her as a human shield.

Analysis

Clearly there were people helping Bin Laden in this location... were they state employees, were they simply from Taliban-related groups, were they from the intelligence agencies?
For all Americans may ask the questions, I doubt they will get any answers. There will be ambiguity about this and the Pakistanis will deny they had any knowledge whatsoever.
The establishment here is made up of army leadership, intelligence agency leadership and some senior civil servants, and they have always run Pakistan, whether democratic governments or military governments, and those people do have connections with jihadis.
The difficulty the West has is in appreciating there are more than 20 different types of jihadi organisations, and al-Qaeda is just one of them. The state has different policies towards different types of group and that subtlety is often lost on Western policy-makers.
"We expected a great deal of resistance and were met with a great deal of resistance. There were many other people who were armed in the compound," Mr Carney said.
Bin Laden himself then resisted the troops and was shot dead, but was not armed, he added.
The CIA is already examining material seized in the raid, including computer hard drives, DVDs and other documents.
No decision had yet been taken on whether to release a photograph of Bin Laden's body, Mr Carney said, conceding that the image was "pretty gruesome" and could inflame some sensitivities.
A Time magazine article, billed as Mr Panetta's first interview since Bin Laden was killed, reports that "the CIA ruled out participating with its nominal South Asian ally early on".
It quotes Mr Panetta as saying "it was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardise the mission. They might alert the targets".
Pakistan received $1.3bn (£786m) in US military and humanitarian aid last year, and provides logistical support for the Nato mission in Afghanistan. However, relations between Islamabad and Washington have been strained by US suspicions that the ISI is covertly backing militants in Afghanistan, and by anger over US drone strikes in Pakistani tribal areas. Continued

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