President Barack Obama has announced Sunday night that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been killed, according to U.S. officials.
Information released by White House sources to news agencies, including the Associated Press, suggested that Osama bin Laden, nominal head of the al-Qaida terrorist organization worldwide, has been killed in U.S. military action and his body is in American custody.
It is reported that Bin Laden was killed a week ago in Islamabad, Pakistan.
16 thoughts on “Osama bin Laden is killed”
The father of all Evil has been eliminated. Thank God Almighty!!!
This is the day of joy to the whole world. Thank God!!!
Great news! Ethiopia’s bin Laden, Meles Zenawi, will be next.
THE WORLD BIGEST DEVIL LEADER KILED BY PEACE FULLY, HAPPEND BY GOD! THANKS GOD.
THANKS GOD!
Good riddance. Gadhafi and Meles will join him soon!
how could he easily get access to Islamabad?
Ofcourse, the snake is slain, but don’t forget as we are surrounded by worms.
Other Osama bin Ladens are on the rise in many countries, including Ethiopia; therefore, we should not be complacent with the death of one heinous murderer, Osama bin Ladens.
First of all I would like to congratualate the US forces, The American President Obama and the American people for defeating the head of all evils. Secondly, I would like to congradulate the victims of that terror act of September 9/11.
It is also a great blow to tyrrants that gives lip service to Democracy , but in fact, they work together with Al qaiida.
In East African states, Al Bashir of Sudan, Esayas of Ertrea & Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, among others.
I think we will see/hear more release of crackdown of Al quaiida network of all over the world.
God save the people of Ethiopia & America.
When he mess with USA, one day he should except this.
May all the evil people like tyrants Meles who enjoys seeing the sufferings of others receive Osama Bin Laden’s fate. In many ways Meles is much worse than Osama. Not only Meles is responsible for more than 3000 innocent lives, tyrant Meles also steals from the poor and stashed it in foreign banks and give the rest to his rich friends in and outside of Ethiopia. I’ve faith that the blood of countless number of innocent Ethiopians Meles spilled won’t go in vain. God works in his timetable and Meles will pay for the atrocities he has committed on millions of Ethiopians. Azeb, Meles and their cronies and a few disgraced non-TPLF Ethiopians who work closely with dictator Meles that enjoys life, and live large with no shame at the expense of poor Ethiopians, while millions of Ethiopians go to bed hungry, deserve to be humiliated and punished severely. It took 10 years to get Osama and the time for the butcher Meles and his gangsters is over do. Ethiopians need to pray to see justice deliver to Ethiopia soon.
Comparison of Bin Laden and Gadafi is like comparing apple and orange. Osma is killer of innocents. Osman killed innocents in thousands at their own home. Indeed, Bin laden and his supporters are blood thirsty psychopaths.
On the other hand, Gadafii is a megalomaniac and stupidly ambitious individual. But under Gadfii, Libya was relatively peaceful and prosperous. He kept his country independent of outside influence, be it from Eastern or Western block.
SUICIDAL AND KILLING OF INNOCENTS IS NOT THE PASSPORT TO HEVEAN BUT IT IS A CHEAP WAY OF FINDING ONESELF TO THE KINGDOM DEVIL OR HELL. SO THE DESCIPLES OF BINLADEN MUST DENOUNCE THIS SAVAGE ACT AND KILLING HUMANITY WHICH IS NOT THE TRUE DOCTRINE OF ISLAM AND ALL RELIGIONS
Ethiopians,it is critically important to capture Meles Legesse Zinawi and bring him to national and international criminal courts for all weird and wicked crimes that he committed on Ethiopians.A single patriotic bullet pierced Bin Laden’s head and settled in the devil’s head for a fraction of a second and exploded balastically and killed immediately the terrorist,Bin Laden.
Wany years ago a group of bandits sworn to the distruction of Ethiopia waged a war and,today terror on Ethiopia.Today,they changed the entire country into their own business empire on untold and unseen scale and had become the most criminal and the richest mafia organization in the world.
As Bin Laden has been the most wanted criminal to America and Americans,Meles Legesse Zinawi,as the head of the terror and mafia organization,has remained the most wanted fugitive in the history of murder and robbery.
America and Americans vowed to capture Bin Laden dead or alive.On that day,Bin Laden received a single patriotic bullet precisly in the head and was captured dead.
May 2, 2011
Detective Work on Courier Led to Breakthrough on Bin Laden
By MARK MAZZETTI and HELENE COOPER WASHINGTON —
After years of dead ends and promising leads gone cold, the big break came last August. A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden’s whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a compound 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American counterterrorism operations. The property was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier. What followed was eight months of painstaking intelligence work, culminating in a helicopter assault by American military and intelligence operatives that ended in the death of Bin Laden on Sunday and concluded one of history’s most extensive and frustrating manhunts. American officials said that Bin Laden was shot in the head after he tried to resist the assault force, and that one of his sons died with him. For nearly a decade, American military and intelligence forces had chased the specter of Bin Laden through Pakistan and Afghanistan, once coming agonizingly close and losing him in a pitched battle at Tora Bora, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. As Obama administration officials described it, the real breakthrough came when they finally figured out the name and location of Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, whom the Qaeda chief appeared to rely on to maintain contacts with the outside world. Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. American intelligence officials said Sunday night that they finally learned the courier’s real name four years ago, but that it took another two years for them to learn the general region where he operated. Still, it was not until August that they tracked him to the compound in Abbottabad, a medium-sized city about an hour’s drive north of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. C.I.A. analysts spent the next several weeks examining satellite photos and intelligence reports to determine who might be living at the compound. A senior administration official said that by September the C.I.A. had decided that there was a “strong possibility” that Bin Laden himself was hiding there. It was hardly the spartan cave in the mountains that many had envisioned as Bin Laden’s hiding place. Rather, it was a mansion on the outskirts of the town’s center, set on an imposing hilltop and ringed by 12-foot-high concrete walls topped with barbed wire. The property was valued at $1 million, but it had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. Its residents were so concerned about security that they burned their trash rather putting it on the street for collection the way their neighbors did. American officials believed that the compound, built in 2005, was designed for the specific purpose of hiding Bin Laden. Months more of intelligence work would follow before American spies felt highly confident that it was indeed Bin Laden and his family who were hiding there — and before President Obama determined that the intelligence was solid enough to begin planning a mission to go after the Qaeda leader. On March 14, Mr. Obama held the first of what would be five national security meetings in the course of the next six weeks to go over plans for the operation. The meetings, attended by only the president’s closest national security aides, took place as other White House officials were scrambling to avert a possible government shutdown over the budget. Four more similar meetings to discuss the plan would follow, until President Obama gathered his aides one final time last Friday. At 8:20 that morning, Mr. Obama met with Thomas Donilon, the national security adviser; John O. Brennan, the counterterrorism adviser; and other senior aides in the Diplomatic Room at the White House. The president was traveling to Alabama later that morning to witness the damage from last week’s tornadoes. But first he had to approve the final plan to send operatives into the compound where the administration believed that Bin Laden was hiding. Even after the president signed the formal orders authorizing the raid, Mr. Obama chose to keep Pakistan’s government in the dark about the operation. “We shared our intelligence on this compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” a senior administration official said. It is no surprise that the administration chose not to tell Pakistani officials. The United States never really believed the Pakistanis’ insistence that Bin Laden was not in their country. American diplomatic cables in recent years show constant American pressure on Pakistan to help find and kill Bin Laden. Asked about the Qaeda leader’s whereabouts during a Congressional visit to Islamabad in September 2009, the Pakistani interior minister, Rehman Malik, replied that he “’had no clue,” but added that he did not believe that Bin Laden was in the area. Bin Laden had sent his family to Iran, so it made sense that he might have gone there himself, Mr. Malik argued. Alternatively, he might be hiding in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, or perhaps he was already dead, he added, according to a cable from the American Embassy that is among the collection obtained by WikiLeaks. The mutual suspicions have grown worse in recent months, particularly after Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. contractor, shot two men on a crowded street in Lahore in January. On Sunday, the small team of American military and intelligence operatives poured out of helicopters for their attack on the heavily fortified compound. American officials gave few details about the raid itself, other than to say that a firefight broke out shortly after the commandos arrived and that Bin Laden had tried to “resist the assault force.” When the shooting had stopped, Bin Laden and three other men lay dead. One woman, whom an American official said had been used as a human shield by one of the Qaeda operatives, was also killed. The Americans collected Bin Laden’s body and loaded it onto one of the remaining helicopters, and the assault force hastily left the scene. Obama administration officials said that one of helicopters went down during the mission because of mechanical failure, but that no Americans were injured. It was 3:50 Eastern time on Sunday afternoon when President Obama received the news that Bin Laden had tentatively been identified, most likely after a series of DNA tests. The Qaeda leader’s body was flown to Afghanistan, the country where he made his fame fighting and killing Soviet troops during the 1980s. From there, American officials said, the body was buried at sea. Outside the Justice Department, other sections of the United States government will probably underplay any evidence of culpability by the Pakistani state or sections of the state, such as its intelligence service, I.S.I., in sheltering bin Laden. As ever, there are many other fish to fry in Islamabad and at the Army headquarters, in nearby Rawalpindi: an exit strategy from Afghanistan, which requires the greatest possible degree of coöperation from Pakistan that can be attained at a reasonable price; nuclear stability; and so on. Pakistan’s military and intelligence service takes risks that others would not dare take because Pakistan’s generals believe that their nuclear deterrent keeps them safe from regime change of the sort under way in Libya, and because they have discovered over the years that the rest of the world sees them as too big to fail. Unfortunately, they probably are correct in their analysis; some countries, like some investment banks, do pose systemic risks so great that they are too big to fail, and Pakistan is currently the A.I.G. of nation-states. But that should not stop American prosecutors from following the law here as they would whenever any mass killer’s hideout is discovered. Of course, Mullah Omar and Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, probably also enjoy refuge in Pakistan. The location of Mullah Omar, in particular, is believed by American officials to be well known to some Pakistani military and intelligence officers; Omar, too, they believe, is effectively under Pakistani state control. Perhaps the circumstantial evidence in the bin Laden case is misleading; only a transparent, thorough investigation by Pakistani authorities into how such a fugitive could have lived so long under the military’s nose without detection would establish otherwise. That sort of transparent investigation is unlikely to take place. On who was living with Bin Laden: The early reports suggest that he was living with his “youngest wife.” Bin Laden, who was fifty-three years old when he died, had always lived surrounded by family and children, so it is not surprising that he had managed to do so even as a fugitive. He is known to have married at least four times. His first wife was a cousin from Syria. His second and third wives were highly educated Saudi women. His fourth wife was a kind of mail-order teen-age bride from Yemen, whom he married while living in Afghanistan during the nineteen-nineties, according to the account of bin Laden’s former Yemeni bodyguard. Bin Laden’s Syrian and Saudi wives were said to have gone home before or immediately after the September 11th attacks, and the Saudi wives were said to be living in the kingdom, without contact with Osama. When I visited Yemen in 2007, to conduct research on the bin Laden family, Yemeni journalists told me that his youngest wife had returned home and was living in the region either of Tai’zz or of Ibb, significant cities to the south of Sanaa, the capital. It seems that she may have found her way to Pakistan to live with her husband. My own guess had been that bin Laden would have accepted informal divorce from his older wives on the ground of involuntary separation, and would have remarried a local woman or two while in hiding in Pakistan, perhaps a daughter presented by one of his Pathan hosts. That is at least conceivable as well. Apparently, one of his adult sons was killed in the raid. Osama has more than a dozen sons. Some have returned to Saudi Arabia, but others have appeared in videos with their father, vowing to fight alongside him. It is conceivable that one of his sons could make a claim on Al Qaeda leadership in the years ahead. On what bin Laden’s death means for Al Qaeda: On the constructive side: The loss of a symbolic, semi-charismatic leader whose own survival burnished his legend is significant. Also, Al Qaeda has never had a leadership succession test. Now it faces one. The organization was founded more than twenty years ago, in the summer of 1988, and at the initial sessions bin Laden was appointed amir and Ayman al-Zawahiri deputy amir. It is remarkable that, for all the No. 3s who have been killed, and for all the ways in which it has been degraded since September 11th, Al Qaeda had retained the same two leaders, continuously, for so long. Zawahiri is famously disputatious and tone-deaf. His relatively recent online “chat” taking questions about Al Qaeda’s violence did not go well. Bin Laden was a gentle and strong communicator, if somewhat incoherent in his thinking. Zawahiri is dogmatic and argumentative, and has a history of alienating colleagues. On the other hand: Al Qaeda is more than just a centralized organization based in Pakistan. It is also a network of franchised or like-minded organizations, and an ideological movement in which followers sometimes act in isolation from leaders. The best guesstimates are that Al Qaeda has several hundred serious members or adherents in Pakistan, along the Pakistan side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and perhaps up to a hundred scattered around Afghanistan. Just last week, the German government disrupted a cell near Dusseldorf in which one of the members, of Moroccan origin, had allegedly travelled to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where he received explosives training from an Al Qaeda contact. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen, appears to be just as potent. Dan Benjamin, the State Department counterterrorism coördinator, gave a speech last week at New America that provided a very good, up-to-date summary of Al Qaeda and its affiliates worldwide, their capabilities and connections to one another. On the hunt itself: After President Obama took office, he and the new Central Intelligence Agency director, Leon Panetta, reorganized the team of analysts devoted to finding Osama bin Laden. The team worked out of ground-floor offices at the Langley headquarters. There were at least two-dozen of them. Some were older analysts who had been part of the C.I.A.’s various bin Laden-hunting efforts going back to the late nineteen-nineties. Others were newer recruits, too young to have been professionally active when bin Laden was first indicted as a fugitive from American justice. As they reset their work, the analysts studied other long-term international fugitive hunts that had ended successfully, such as the operations that led to the death of the Medellín Cartel leader Pablo Escobar, in 1993. The analysts asked, Where did the breakthroughs in these other hunts come from? What were the clues that made the difference and how were the clues discovered? They tried to identify “signatures” of Osama bin Laden’s life style that might lead to such a clue: prescription medications that he might purchase, hobbies or other habits of shopping or movement that might give him away. The Langley analysts were one headquarters egghead element of the hunt. Similar analytical units, at Central Command, in Tampa, and at the International Security Assistance Force, in Kabul, sorted battlefield and all-source intelligence, designated subjects for additional collection, and conducted pattern analysis of relationships among terrorists, couriers, and raw data collected in the field. Detainee operators in Iraq, in Afghanistan, at Guantanámo, and at secret C.I.A. sites also participated. Apparently, the breakthrough started several years back from detainee interrogations; it’s not clear yet how or by what means the information about the courier who led to the Abbottabad compound was extracted. Overseas, C.I.A. officers in the Directorate of Operations and the Special Activities Division—intelligence officers who ran sources and collected information, as well as armed paramilitaries—carried out the search for informants from bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Units from the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, which includes the Navy Seals, Delta, and other specialized groups, joined in. Often, Special Operations and the C.I.A. worked in blended task-force teams deployed around Afghanistan, and, more problematically, as the Raymond Davis case indicated, around Pakistan. These teams searched not only for bin Laden but also for other “high-value targets,” as they are legally and bureaucratically known inside the U.S. government. My understanding is that, as of this spring, there were approximately forty legally designated, fugitive high-value targets at the top of the wanted-list system. If there were forty, I suppose there are now thirty-nine.