Report: DNA Confirms Osama bin Laden's Death
BOSTON, May 2 (Agencies) : The death of a sister of Osama bin Laden at Massachusetts General Hospital allowed the United States to confirm bin Laden's death, ABC News reported.
When his sister died in Boston, tissue from her body was taken by government officials for DNA testing, ABC News correspondent Brian Ross reported.
A screen grab from Express TV shows the dead body of Osama bin Laden, as seen in Islamabad, Pakistan
That tissue sample was used to match the DNA found on the man killed by special forces troops who conducted the raid on bin Laden's Pakistani compound.
Officials said bin Laden's identity was confirmed through DNA testing.
His body is being handled in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition, one senior administration official said.
He is expected to be buried at sea.
Osama bin Laden Dead: US President
Washington, May 2 (Agencies / BBC): Al-Qaeda founder and leader Osama Bin Laden has been killed by US forces in Pakistan, President Obama has said.
The al-Qaeda leader was killed in a ground operation outside Islamabad based on US intelligence, the first lead for which emerged last August.
Obama said after "a firefight", US forces took possession of his body.
Bin Laden was accused of being behind a number of atrocities, including the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001.
He was top of the US "most wanted" list.
Obama said it was "the most significant achievement to date in our nation's effort to defeat al-Qaeda".
The US has put its embassies around the world on alert, warning Americans of the possibility of al-Qaeda reprisal attacks for Bin Laden's killing.
Crowds gathered outside the White House in Washington DC, chanting "USA, USA" after the news emerged.
Last night there were rumours an operation was going on in an area close to Abbottabad. There were unconfirmed reports of a military helicopter crashing in the area as well.
Witnesses said the whole area was cordoned off and nobody was allowed close although they did hear gunshots and firearms. But nobody had any inkling that this was an operation to get Osama Bin Laden.
For those who keep a close on eye on these matters it wasn't a total shock that he was ultimately hunted down in an urban area.
In the past we have had reports of him being treated in hospitals in Rawalpindi for kidney problems. There was even one report that he was treated in the southern city of Karachi. All of these were officially denied.
And some of the big al-Qaeda and Taliban names in the past have been captured in big Pakistani cities. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Kuwaiti-born senior al-Qaeda leader, was captured in Rawalpindi and Afghan Taliban military commander Mullah Baradar was reportedly captured in Karachi.
Bin Laden approved the 9/11 attacks in which nearly 3,000 people died, saying later that the results had exceeded his expectations.
He evaded the forces of the US and its allies for almost a decade, despite a $25m bounty on his head.
His death will be seen as a major blow to al-Qaeda but also raises fears of reprisal attacks, correspondents say.
Obama said he had been briefed last August on a possible lead to Bin Laden's whereabouts.
"It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground," Obama said.
"I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located Bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan.
"And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorised an operation to get Osama Bin Laden and bring him to justice," the president said.
On Sunday a small team of US forces undertook the operation in Abbottabad, north of Islamabad.
After a "firefight" Bin Laden was killed and his body taken by US forces, the president said.
He said "no Americans were harmed" in the operation.
'Momentous achievement'
Former US President Bill Clinton said in a statement: "This is a profoundly important moment not just for the families of those who lost their lives on 9/11 and in al-Qaeda's other attacks but for people all over the world who want to build a common future of peace, freedom, and cooperation for our children."
Clinton's successor, President George W Bush, described the news as a "momentous achievement".
"The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done," Bush said in a statement.
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says that, to many in the West, Bin Laden became the embodiment of global terrorism, but to others he was a hero, a devout Muslim who fought two world superpowers in the name of jihad.
The son of a wealthy Saudi construction family, Bin Laden grew up in a privileged world. But soon after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan he joined the mujahideen there and fought alongside them with his Arab followers, a group that later formed the nucleus for al-Qaeda.
After declaring war on America in 1998, Bin Laden is widely believed to have been behind the bombings of US embassies in East Africa, a billion-dollar US warship, and the attacks on New York and Washington.
Al-Qaida No. 2 Zawahri Most Likely to Succeed Osama bin Laden
May 2 (Reuters) : Zawahri has been the brains behind bin Laden and his al-Qaida network, and at times its most public face, repeatedly denouncing the United States and its allies in video messages.
In the latest monitored by the SITE Intelligence Group last month, he urged Muslims to fight NATO and American forces in Libya.
"I want to direct the attention of our Muslim brothers in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and the rest of the Muslim countries, that if the Americans and the NATO forces enter Libya then their neighbours in Egypt and Tunisia and Algeria and the rest of the Muslim countries should rise up and fight both the mercenaries of Gaddafi and the rest of NATO," Zawahri said.
Born into an upper-class family of scholars and doctors in an upscale Cairo neighbourhood, the cerebral Egyptian in his late-50s is second after bin Laden on the FBI "most wanted terrorists" list.
Both bin laden and Zawahiri eluded capture when U.S.-led forces toppled Afghanistan's Taliban government in late 2001 after al-Qaida's Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. cities.
But on Sunday bin Laden was killed in a firefight with U.S. forces and his body was recovered, U.S. President Barack Obama said. There was no word on Zawahri.
Bespectacled, with grey hair and a grey beard, Zawahri won prominence in Nov. 2008, when he attacked then U.S. President-elect Obama as a "house Negro," a racially-charged term used by 1960s black American Muslim leader Malcolm X to describe black slaves loyal to white masters.
In a subsequent video, in Sept. 2009, Zawahri returned to the attack on Obama, saying he was no different from his predecessor George W. Bush.
"America has come with a new deceptive face ... It plants the same dagger as Bush and his predecessors did. Obama has resorted to the policies of his predecessors in lying and selling illusions," said Zawahri, clad in white robe and turban.
Like bin Laden, Zawahri has long been thought to be hiding along the rugged Afghan-Pakistan border. The last video of Zawahri and bin Laden together was broadcast by al Jazeera on Sept. 10, 2003. It showed them walking in mountains, calling for jihad and praising the Sept. 11 hijackers.
"BRAIN TO THE BODY" Analysts have described Zawahri as al-Qaida's chief organiser and bin Laden's closest mentor. "Ayman is for bin Laden like the brain to the body," said Montasser al-Zayat, a lawyer in Cairo who once represented Zawahri.
In a video after the Sept. 11 attacks, Zawahri called them a "great victory" achieved "thanks to God".
He has not always been so ebullient. As U.S.-led forces drove out the Taliban in 2001, Afghan sources described him flying into a fury at the nonchalance of Taliban fighters playing badminton behind the front lines while U.S. bombs rained from the skies.
Zawahri and bin Laden met in the mid-1980s when both were in the Pakistani city of Peshawar to support guerrillas fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and worked closely thereafter. But the alliance was not Zawahri's first foray into militancy.
Born in 1951, he was the son of a pharmacology professor and grandson of the grand imam of Al Azhar, one of the most important mosques in the Muslim world.
He graduated from Egypt's most prestigious medical school in 1974 and did a second degree in surgery. By then he was involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, a non-violent group seeking the creation of a single Islamic state.
When the militant Egyptian Islamic Jihad was founded in 1973, he joined. When members posed as soldiers and assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, he was among 301 people arrested
He went on trial but was cleared. He did, though, spend three years in jail for having an unlicensed pistol. On his release, Zawahri made his way to Pakistan where he worked with the Red Crescent treating fighters wounded in the Afghan war.
Taking over the leadership of Jihad in Egypt in 1993, he was a key figure in a campaign in the mid-1990s to set up a purist Islamic state there, in which more than 1,200 Egyptians died.
In 1999, an Egyptian military court sentenced Zawahri to death in absentia. He has also been indicted in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Days after those bombings, he telephoned a Pakistani reporter, denying responsibility, but urging Muslims to "continue their jihad against the Americans and Jews".
An hour later, U.S. cruise missiles hit al-Qaida's Afghan training camps. Both bin Laden and Zawahri escaped injury.
Zawahri's wife, Azza, and three daughters were reported killed in a bombing strike on the Afghan city of Kandahar, the stronghold of the Taliban, in early December 2001.
Zawahri has appeared regularly in a series of video or audio messages since then, criticising the U.S. war in Iraq, praising the Taliban and the suicide bombers who attack London in 2005 and urging Muslims to help victims of an earthquake in Pakistan.
He has occasionally shown he is aware of criticisms by Muslims who dislike the group's indiscriminate violence. "SEIZE A STATE"
In a 2005 letter to Iraq al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Zawahri suggested it was time to end beheadings of captives and start acting as more of a political leader in anticipation of the eventual U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.
In 2008, Zawahri held an unprecedented question and answer session online with al-Qaida sympathisers who repeatedly questioned him over the group's killings of civilians in Iraq.
Zawahri in his responses denied killing innocents, and said that if any died in attacks it was through error or necessity, for example if they were being used as human shields
Zawahri has repeatedly called for al-Qaida to seize control of a state, a goal the group has never come close to despite its alliance with Afghanistan's late 1990s Taliban rulers.
"Confronting the enemies of Islam and waging a jihad against them require a Muslim authority, established on Muslim territory that raises the banner of jihad and rallies Muslims around it," he wrote in a 2001 essay, Knights Under The Prophet's Banner.
"If we do not achieve this goal, our actions will be nothing more than small scale harassment."
Jubilant Crowds In US Celebrate Osama's Death
Hundreds of people have been gathering outside the White House to celebrate the news that Osama Bin Laden has been killed by US special forces.
Crowds chanted "USA, USA" and waved flags and hastily made banners.
"There are streams of people going down and gathering outside the White House. We understand that at one baseball match the crowd were shouting 'USA, USA'.
"I think this is what we are going to see across the country now."
Former US President George W Bush called the killing of Bin Laden a "momentous achievement".
In a statement he said: "The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done."
Former US Secretary of State Conoleezza Rice said: "The demise of Osama Bin Laden is a tremendous victory for the American people.
"Nothing can bring back Bin Laden's innocent victims, but perhaps this can help salve the wounds of their loved ones."
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Americans had kept their promise after the September 11 attacks to capture or kill Bin Laden.
He said he hoped the news would "bring some closure and comfort to all those who lost loved ones" that day.