Bin Laden killed in Pakistan, America rejoices
After a 10-year manhunt for the world's most-wanted terrorist, US elite commandos tracked down and killed Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011.
Here are extracts from AFP's coverage of the dramatic operation, starting with reporting from Pakistan, where bin Laden was confronted in a top-secret raid on his compound.
ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan, May 2, 2011 (AFP) - Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was shot dead deep inside Pakistan in a night-time helicopter raid by US commandos, ending a decade-long manhunt for the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
President Barack Obama on Monday hailed bin Laden's death, saying the "world is safer, it is a better place", a day after he announced the success of the operation in a dramatic televised address, noting "justice has been done."
DNA tests confirmed the body was that of bin Laden, a senior US official said after the daring raid on the Al-Qaeda leader's compound in the garrison town of Abbottabad, less than two hours' drive north of Islamabad.
(...)
- Heavily fortified compound -
Obama said he had directed US special forces to attack the heavily fortified compound after a tip-off that first emerged last August.
"A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability," the president said. "After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body."
Bin Laden's body was buried at sea, having been administered Islamic religious rites, US officials said. "We wanted to avoid a situation where it would become a shrine," one said.
The body, which was wrapped in a white sheet and placed in a weighted bag, "was placed on a prepared flat-board... (and) eased into the sea," a separate senior defence official said.
Elite troops from the US Navy SEALs carried out the assault, which lasted less than 40 minutes, killing bin Laden with a bullet to the head, another US official told AFP.
The SEALs -- which stands for Sea, Air, Land -- are used for some of the riskiest anti-terrorism missions and were loaned to the CIA for the mission.
Footage taken by the US network ABC inside the house showed blood on the floor in one room and broken computers in another, stripped of their hard drives.
- Locals stunned -
Explosions, helicopters clattering overhead and gunfire tore locals from their sleep as they rushed to see what was going on, residents said.
Ejaz Mahmood, an Abbottabad tailor, said he heard a blast in the early hours and "saw a fireball coming down from the air".
One helicopter in the raid went down due to "mechanical failure" but was blown up by its crew, who left the compound along with the assault force on another chopper, a US official said.
Residents were stunned when they switched on their TV sets after daybreak to hear Obama announce that bin Laden had been killed in their home town, which was soon engulfed by a heavy Pakistani security presence.
"We heard ambulance sirens and security people shouting. We saw fire and flames coming out," according to another resident who was too frightened to give his name.
Senior US officials said two brothers believed to be bin Laden's couriers and one of his adult sons were also killed in the raid, while a woman who was used as a human shield perished.
Officials said they were stunned when intelligence reports first revealed the elaborate security at the compound, with four-to-six metre high walls topped with barbed wire.
"Everything we saw, the extremely elaborate operational security, the brothers' background and their behaviour, and the location and the design of the compound itself, was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden's hideout to look like," one senior US official said.
- Years on the run -
Until now, bin Laden had always managed to evade US forces, despite a $25 million bounty, and was most often thought to be hiding on the Afghan-Pakistani border.
George W. Bush, US president at the time of the 9/11 attacks when about 3,000 people died, said bin Laden's death was a "victory for America".
"The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done," he said.
In a spontaneous eruption of joy, thousands gathered outside the gates of the White House, cheering, waving US flags and shouting "USA, USA". Another large crowd gathered at Ground Zero in New York, singing "God Bless America".
(...)
Born in Riyadh in 1957, bin Laden was the son of a construction tycoon whose riches enabled the future Al-Qaeda
leader to fund Islamic fighters waging war against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
He went on to build a many-tentacled extremist group that earned global prominence by bombing US embassies in East Africa in 1998.
But both in 1998 and after 9/11, bin Laden was unrepentant about what he called his divinely ordained mission against the United States and Israel.
"Jihad will continue," he said not long after September 11, 2001. "Even if I am not around."
- Watched from the White House -
Obama and his team watched the raid in the White House in real time, as it unfolded thousands of kilometres away.
WASHINGTON, May 3, 2011 (AFP) - Agonizing "minutes passed like days" after Barack Obama made what a top aide dubbed the "gutsiest" presidential call in years, and followed in real time as special forces swooped on Osama bin Laden.
Obama's gruff anti-terror advisor John Brennan, who hunted the Al-Qaeda mastermind for 15 years, offered tantalizing details Monday of the high-stakes operation in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad in which bin Laden died.
"It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time, I think, in the lives of the people who were assembled here yesterday," Brennan told reporters in a colourful White House briefing.
(...)
Brennan would not say exactly how Obama and his top advisers were able to follow Sunday's 40-minute Navy SEAL operation unfolding in real time in the White House Situation Room.
But the suspicion was that some kind of sophisticated communications technology was available to them, possibly with video or photographs transmitted back from the scene.
"It was clearly very tense, a lot of people holding their breath," Brennan said. "And there was a fair degree of silence as it progressed as we would get the updates.
"When we finally were informed that those individuals who were able to go in that compound and found an individual that they believed was bin Laden, there was a tremendous sigh of relief."
- 'It's a go' -
This piece looks at the build-up to Obama's decision to order the mission.
WASHINGTON, May 3, 2011 (AFP) - It took years of painstaking intelligence analysis to find Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, but only three words -- "It's a go", uttered by President Barack Obama -- to launch the strike that would kill him.
Obama told his national security advisor Tom Donilon and several other top aides on Friday morning that he would sign off on the daring plan in a moment of drama in the ornate Diplomatic Room of the White House.
The violent and sudden operation in which bin Laden died in a short, intense firefight Sunday in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, contrasted with the months analysts spent piecing together clues that finally tracked him down.
Ever since bin Laden escaped in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountain region in 2001 after Al-Qaeda's deadly September 11 strikes, his trail had gone largely cold as he stayed hidden and avoided telephone calls that US spies could trace.
But senior officials said that they had a breakthrough last September, when they managed to link two couriers used by bin Laden to contact the outside world to a compound in the leafy garrison city near Islamabad.
(...)
But officials, from Obama on down, never had 100 percent certainty that the Al-Qaeda chief was inside the heavily fortified complex -- right up until the moment when they learned that he had been killed in the operation.