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For 6 yrs, Osama lived in Pak under army nose
Zardari denies reports of Pak sheltering Osama
US choppers flew from Jalalabad for ‘Op Geronimo’
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US seizes crucial DVDs from hideout
How does US know it has its man? China backs Pak’s fight against terror
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For 6 yrs, Osama lived in Pak under army nose
Washington/Islamabad, May 3
Osama was staying in a $1 million three-storeyed mansion just 800 yards from the Pakistan Military Academy, about 60 km from the country’s capital Islamabad, when he was eliminated by US commandos yesterday. Given the mansion’s “closeness to the central location of the Pakistani army”, several US lawmakers described as “astounding” and “difficult to understand” Pakistan’s claim that they did not know about bin Laden’s presence in their soil. An indication as to how long the mastermind behind the deadly 9/11 terror attack in US stayed in the mansion was given by the Seal team of the American Navy involved in the dramatic 40-minute operation. John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s adviser on counter-terrorism, said the Seal team which undertook the operation believed that the 54-year-old Al-Qaida chief had lived in the compound targetted in the attack for six years. Other top US officials said that latest intelligence reports indicated that the Al-Qaida chief had been living in the Abbottabad mansion for over six years. His’s presence in Pakistan had been denied for years by the country’s top leadership. US lawmakers pilloried Pakistan and said it would be a “real pressure” on that country to prove they did not know bin Laden’s presence deep inside their country. They said they had strong suspicions that its powerful spy agency ISI was aware about bin Laden’s presence in the country. “It’s very difficult for me to understand how this huge compound could be built in a city just an hour north of the capital of Pakistan, in a city that contained military installations, including the Pakistani military academy, and that it did not arouse tremendous suspicion, especially since there were no Internet or telephone connections and the waste was incinerated and there was barbed wire all around the top of the compound,” Senator Susan Collins said. Senator Joe Lieberman said there were going to be a lot of questions raised in the US Congress about what people in the Pakistani intelligence agency particularly knew or should have known about the presence of bin Laden in Pakistan itself. “For years, you know, the Pakistani officials have said to us he’s not in Pakistan; he’s in the mountains in Waziristan between Pakistan and Afghanistan.” He said: “We have a lot of reason to believe that elements of their intelligence community continue to be very closely in touch with and perhaps supportive of terrorist groups that are fighting us and the Afghans in Afghanistan.” In Lieberman’s view, it will be a “real pressure” on Pakistan to prove they did not know bin Laden’s presence. — PTI
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Zardari denies reports of Pak sheltering Osama
Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has denied suggestions that his country’s security forces may have sheltered Osama bin Laden, and added that Islamabad’s cooperation with the US had helped to pinpoint bin Laden’s whereabouts. In an article for the Washington Post, Zardari said “Some in the US press have suggested that Pakistan lacked vitality in its pursuit of terrorism, or worse yet that we were disingenuous and actually protected the terrorists we claimed to be pursuing. Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn’t reflect fact.” — ANI America closes its embassy, consulates in Pak
The US on Tuesday closed its embassy and consulates in Pakistan to the general public until further notice, a day after American Special Forces killed Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden. The move came amid fears of reprisals by the Pakistani Taliban and Al-Qaida for the killing of bin Laden, who was hiding out in a compound located a few hundred metres from the Pakistan Military Academy. — PTI US mulls releasing pics of Osama’s corpse
The White House on Tuesday said it was weighing whether to release pictures of Osama bin Laden’s corpse to put at rest speculations and disbeliefs in some quarters about the death of world’s most wanted fugitive. Pakistani electronic media on Monday created a flutter by circulating a fake photograph of bin Laden’s body after he had been shot. Later, the media apologised and retracted the picture. — PTI Osama’s guards may
have killed him: Report
Osama bin Laden might have been killed by one of his own guards in line with his will to prevent his capture during a raid by US forces, according to a media report on Tuesday. An unnamed told the Dawn newspaper that he "might have been killed by one of his own guards in line with his will to avert his capture". — PTI
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US choppers flew from Jalalabad for ‘Op Geronimo’
Washington, May 3 By the time, Pakistani military was scrambling forces in response to the incursion into their territory everything was over. “Thankfully, there was no engagement with the Pakistani forces,” John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s Adviser on counter-terrorism, said on the 40-minute operation in the small hours of Monday not far away from Pakistan’s capital Islamabad. On Sunday, the White House officials cancelled all public tours of the West Wing Area in the President’s House so that unsuspecting terrorists wouldn’t run into security officials moving in and out of the situation room, from where the run-up to the operation was being monitored. A little after 2 pm (local time), CIA chief Leon Panetta detailed the operation to the group headed by the President in the situation room for the last time. Within an hour, he declared: “They (the team) have crossed into Pakistan.” The aim was to get in and get out of Pakistan, across the border in Afghanistan, before their breach can be detected by Pakistani authorities. The US Naval Seals team stormed into the million-dollar mansion where Osama was living and a fire-fight broke out with the terrorists inside. The commandos found bin Laden on the third floor wearing salwar kameez and US officials said he put up a fight before he was shot above the left eye near the end of the operation. “Whether or not he got off any rounds, I frankly don’t know,” Brennan told a press conference. But officials said he was “killed by US bullets”, US media reported. Brennan said they would have taken bin Laden alive if he had not presented any threat. A picture taken by a Seals commando and processed through facial recognition software suggested a 95 per cent certainty that it was Bin Laden. Later, DNA tests comparing samples with relatives found a 99.9 per cent match, The New York Times reported. But, the Americans faced other problems. One of their helicopters stalled and could not take off. Rather than let it fall into the wrong hands, the commandos moved the women and children, who were unharmed in the operation, to a secured area and destroyed the defective chopper. By that point, though, the Pakistani military was scrambling forces in response to the incursion into Pakistani territory. “They had no idea about who might have been on there,” Brennan said. — PTI
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US seizes crucial DVDs from hideout
US special forces came away with hard drives, DVDs and a trove of documents from the Abbottabad safe house of Osama bin Laden, which might tip American intelligence to Al-Qaida's operational plan and lead the manhunt to his presumed successor Ayman al Zawahiri. The documents could also provide details of Qaida's links to terror groups like the Taliban, Haqqani network, LeT and JeM. The CIA has established a task force to study the material recovered from the mansion.
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How does US know it has its man? For any elite special forces squad trained to hunt and liquidate its enemies the ability to kill with cold precision is only one of a number of skill sets that such a team must learn. Once your target is down, for instance, how do you ensure that you have your man? During briefings over the past 48 hours, the White House’s counter terrorism adviser John Brennan has stressed that Osama Bin Laden’s identity has been proven by a DNA analysis showing a 99.9% probability that Navy Seal Team Six had killed the Al-Qa’ida founder. Experts say an analysis proving such a high probability, which can be completed in a matter of hours, would likely have used samples from close relatives such as a parent or child. But he also hinted at a string of secondary identification methods involving “facial recognition and [his] height.” What Brennan was alluding to is an increasingly sophisticated arsenal of biometric technology which is now used by the US military to identify their targets either on arrest or post mortem. Journalists who have encountered elite squads in Afghanistan and Iraq have noticed that many now carry boxy goggles to collect and process biometric data from people’s faces. The devices are known as Secure Electronic Enrolment Kits (SEEK), a handheld biometric recorder weighing just under 2kg which takes iris scans, fingerprints and facial scans and ports them back to an FBI database in West Virginia in seconds. The US military have been helped by vastly improved biometric technology which has made the use of such tools on the battlefield increasingly common in the past three years. When American forces invaded Iraq in 2003 they brought with them, the first generation of biometric recorders. But compared to today’s handheld devices they were bulky giants weighing a highly impractical 22kgs and using separate iris scanners and finger print recorders wired up to a heavy duty laptop. According to Wired, which spoke to a defence source familiar with the devices, the new SEEK recorders use the kind of wireless and 3G technology found in smart phones to relay measurements back to an FBI database which delivers the results “wham bam”. It is unlikely the FBI would have had iris scans of Bin Laden but they would almost certainly have built up a complicated measurement portrait of his facial features through photographs. In Afghanistan the US military and FBI have begun using databases to compile hundreds of thousands biometric profiles in a bid to prove who insurgents are if they are captured a second time. “A strong Afghan biometric program reduces the enemy’s anonymity and his capability to operate anonymously in the battle space,” Air Force Lt. Col. Cristiano Marchiori, an advisor to the program, told the FBI’s own website in a recent article on biometrics. “If we have one unique identifier-a set of prints, an iris scan-it’s hard for the enemy to hide among the population when he’s trying to register a vehicle or vote or move around the country freely.”
— The Independent
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China backs Pak’s fight against terror
Beijing: In the face of severe criticism of Pakistan over the presence of Osama bin Laden on its soil, China today put up a strong defence of its close ally saying Islamabad has made important contribution to the global fight against terrorism. "We have to admit that the Pakistan government is firm in resolve and strong in action in the fight against terrorism, and Pakistan government has made important contribution to the international fight against terrorism, to which we should have no doubt," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu told a media briefing here. Answering a volley of questions on the US action on bin Laden's hideout yesterday, Jiang said, "Pakistan is at the important forefront of international war on terrorism." — PTI
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Washington/Islamabad, May 3
