The White House on Tuesday revised its version of events surrounding Osama bin Laden's death saying that the Al-Qaida leader was unarmed and not hiding behind his wife, when he was fatally shot in an encounter with the US Special Forces in Pakistan on Sunday.

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that Laden was not armed at the time the Special Forces team stormed into his bedroom on the third floor of a mansion in Abbottabad.

Asked by a reporter how Laden could have resisted, if he did not have a weapon, Carney said: "I think resistance does not require a firearm."

He insisted that the US Special Forces team had "Handled themselves with the utmost professionalism and (Laden) was killed in an operation because of the resistance that they met."

The statements today contradict an earlier claim made by US President Barack Obama's counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, that Laden had used his wife as a human shield. Brennan had also said that Laden had engaged in a firefight with members of the Special Forces.

"Here is Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield," Brennan told reporters on Monday. "I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years."

Carney attributed this misinformation to the White House's 'great haste' to get out information on the operation.

The White House is also weighing the possibility of releasing images of a dead Laden that US officials described as gruesome. US officials are worried the images may inflame some sensitivities and precipitate a terrorist attack.

Meanwhile, CIA Director Leon Panetta said in interviews that the CIA did not have photographs or any other proof that Laden was living on the compound in Abbottabad. He told Time magazine that analysts were only 60-80 per cent certain that Laden would be found.

"We never had direct evidence that he in fact had ever been there or was located there," Panetta said told "PBS NewsHour" in another interview. "The reality was that we could have gone in there and not found Laden at all."

"There was concern that Laden would oppose the operation... and, indeed, he did resist," Carney said.

The growing controversy about how Osama bin Laden was killed is temporarily distracting attention away from Pakistan’s role in providing a support network for the terrorist leader and his followers.

Earlier in London, British Prime Minister David Cameron, who is under pressure to cancel aid to Pakistan, told MPs, "The fact that bin Laden was living in a large house in a populated area suggests that he must have had an extensive support network in Pakistan. Of course, there are frustrations and questions will be asked about who knew what in Pakistan and how could this man live in such a large house in such a comfortable-looking community so close to military installations.”

MPs from all parties have expressed concern about Pakistan’s role. Labour MP Paul Flynn commented on "six years of treachery by powerful people in Pakistan". Kris Hopkins, a Conservative MP, said "something stinks" about bin Laden's earlier success in evading capture.

Yet another MP, former Labour minister Malcolm Wicks, asked the British Prime Minister to review a recent agreement to exchange information with Pakistan on how to combat roadside bombs.

Questions about Islamabad’s role in providing shelter to Laden have also been raised elsewhere in Europe with French Foreign Minister Alan Juppe commenting, "I find it hard to believe that the presence of a person or individual such as Bin Laden in a small compound in a relatively small town…could go completely unnoticed."

Some of the most searing criticism of the Pakistani military in particular, as well as the ISI intelligence service, has come from a leading British academic.

Professor Shaun Gregory, who heads the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford. In a letter to The Times, he says that the Pakistani military and the ISI have "Peddled four big lies to the West: that AQ Khan was acting alone when he established and ran for nearly two decades the largest clandestine nuclear proliferation network in history; that the Afghan Taliban and its spiritual leader Mullah Omar do not have safe havens in Pakistan; that Pakistan does not support terrorist organisations as instruments of state policy in its struggle with India ; and that Osama Bin Laden was not in Pakistan."

Professor Gregory goes on to ask, "Is it not time to accept that the Pakistan army/ISI constitutes an enormous threat to Western interests and that the failed policies of the past towards the Pakistan army/ISI, in particular that of military aid, must be recalibrated?"

Meanwhile Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called on the US to release the "precise facts surrounding his killing" to make sure it conforms to international law.

“This was a complex operation and it would be helpful if we knew the precise facts surrounding his killing,” Pillay said. 

So why are we in Afghanistan? Didn't the Americans and the British go there in 2001 to fight Osama bin Laden? Wasn't he killed on Monday? There was painful symbolism in the Nato airstrike yesterday - scarcely 24 hours after Bin Laden's death - that killed yet more Afghan security guards. For the truth is that we long ago lost the plot in the graveyard of empires, turning a hunt for a now largely irrelevant inventor of global jihad into a war against tens of thousands of Taliban insurgents who have little interest in Al-Qaida, but much enthusiasm to drive Western armies out of their country.

The gentle hopes of Hamid Karzai and Hillary Clinton - that the Taliban will be so cowed by the killing of Bin Laden that they will want to become pleasant democrats and humbly join the Western-supported and utterly corrupt leadership of Afghanistan - shows just how out of touch they are with the blood-soaked reality of the country. Some of the Taliban admired Bin Laden, but they did not love him and he had been no part of their campaign against Nato. Mullah Omar is more dangerous to the West in Afghanistan than Bin Laden. And we haven't killed Omar.

Iran, for once, spoke for millions of Arabs in its response to Bin Laden's death. "An excuse for alien countries to deploy troops in this region under the pretext of fighting terrorism has been eliminated," its foreign ministry spokesman has said. "We hope this development will end war, conflict, unrest and the death of innocent people, and help to establish peace and tranquility in the region.

Newspapers across the Arab world said the same thing. If this is such a great victory for the United States, it's time to go home; which, of course, the US has no intention of doing just now.

That many Americans think the same thing is not going to change the topsy-turvy world in which US policy is framed. For there is one home truth which the world still has not grasped: that the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt - and, more pressing, the bloodbaths in Libya and Syria and the dangers to Lebanon - are of infinitely graver importance than blowing away a bearded man who has been elevated in the West's immature imagination into Hitlerian proportions.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's brilliant address in Istanbul yesterday - calling for the Syrians to stop killing their people and for Gaddafi to leave Libya - was more eloquent, more powerful and more historic than the petty, boastful, Hollywood speeches of Obama and Clinton on Monday. We are now wasting our time speculating who will "take over" Al-Qaida - Zawahiri or Saif al-Adel - when the movement has no "leadership" as such, bin Laden being the founder rather than the boss.

But, a day being a long time in the killing fields of the Middle East, just 24 hours after Osama Bin Laden died, other questions were growing thicker yesterday. If, for example, Barack Obama really thinks the world is "a safer place" after bin Laden's death, how come the US has increased its threat alert and embassies around the world are being told to take extra precautions against attack?

And just what did happen in that tatty compound - no longer, it seems, a million-dollar "mansion" - when bin Laden's sulphurous life was brought to an end? Human Rights Watch is unlikely to be the only institution to demand a "thorough, transparent investigation" into the killing.

There was an initial story from Pentagon "sources" which had two of bin Laden's wives killed and a woman held as a "human shield" dying too. Within hours, the wives were alive and in some accounts, the third woman simply disappeared.

And then of course, there's Pakistan, eagerly telling the world that it participated in the attack on Bin Laden, only to have President Zardari retract the entire story yesterday. Two hours later, we had an American official describing the attack on bin Laden as a "shared achievement".

And there's bin Laden's secret burial in the Arabian Sea. Was this planned before the attack on bin Laden, with the clear plan to kill rather than capture him? And if it was carried out "according to Islamic rights" - the dead man's body washed and placed in a white shroud - it must have taken a long time for the officer on the USS Carl Vinson to devise a 50-minute religious ceremony and arrange for an Arabic-speaking sailor to translate it.

So now for a reality check. The world is not safer for bin Laden's killing. It is safer because of the winds of freedom blowing through the Middle East. If the West treats the people of this region with justice rather than military firepower, then Al-Qaida becomes even more irrelevant than it has been since the Arab revolutions.

Of course, there is one positive side for the Arab world. With bin Laden killed, the Gaddafis and the Salehs and the Assads will find it all the more difficult to claim that a man who is now dead is behind the popular revolutions trying to overthrow them. — By arrangement with The Independent

Abbottabad, May 4
When a woman involved in a polio vaccine drive turned up at Osama bin Laden’s hideaway, she remarked to the men behind the high walls about the expensive SUVs parked inside. The men took the vaccine, apparently to administer to the 23 children at the compound, and told her to go away.

The terror chief and his family kept well hidden behind thick walls in this northwestern hill town they shared with thousands of Pakistani soldiers. But glimpses of their life are emerging - along with deep scepticism that authorities didn’t know they were there. Although the house is large, it was unclear how three dozen people could have lived there with any degree of comfort.

Neighbours said they knew little about those inside in the compound but bin Laden apparently depended on two men who would routinely emerge to run errands or to a neighbourhood gathering, such as a funeral. There were conflicting details about the men’s identities. Several people said they were known as Tariq and Arshad Khan and had identified themselves as cousins from elsewhere in northwestern Pakistan. Others gave different names and believed they were brothers. Arshad was the oldest, and both spoke multiple languages, including Pashto and Urdu, which are common here, residents said.

As Navy SEALs swept through the compound early Monday, they handcuffed those they encountered with plastic zip ties and pressed on in pursuit of bin Laden. After killing the terror leader, his son and two others, they doubled back to move nine women and 23 children away from the compound, according to US officials.

Construction of the three-story house began about seven years ago, locals said. People initially were curious about the heavily fortified compound . Those who live nearby said the people in Laden’s compound rarely strayed outside. Khurshid Bibi, in her 70s, said one man living in the compound had given her a lift to the market in the rain. She said her grandchildren played with the kids in the house and that the adults there gave them rabbits as a gift. But the occupants also attracted criticism. — AP