Sea burial of Osama bin Laden breaks sharia law, say Muslim scholars

US decision to dispose of body in the sea prevents grave site becoming a shrine but clerics warn it may lead to reprisals

Osama bin Laden's burial reportedly took place from the deck of the USS aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, above. Photograph: Timothy A. Hazel/AFP/Getty Images

Osama bin Laden's burial at sea was quickly criticised by Muslim scholars who claimed it had breached sharia law and warned that it may provoke calls for revenge attacks against US targets.
Others used the sea burial question to doubt whether he was, in fact, dead at all, with doubts fuelled by the absence of authentic photographs of his corpse.
Burying the al-Qaida leader on land could have led to his grave becoming a focus of contention and pilgrimage as well as posing tough questions about where he should be laid to rest.
"Finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world's most wanted terrorist would have been difficult," a US official said. "So the US decided to bury him at sea." The burial reportedly took place from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in the North Arabian sea.
Senior US officials told news agencies that his body would be disposed of in accordance with Islamic tradition, which involves ritual washing, shrouding and burial within 24 hours.
The 24-hour rule has not always been applied in the past. For example, there was controversy when the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein - sons of the Iraqi dictator Saddam - were embalmed and held for 11 days after they were killed by US forces. Their bodies were later shown to media.
Standard Muslim practice involves placing the body in a grave with the head pointed toward the holy city of Mecca. Burial at sea is rare in Islam, though Muslim websites say it is permitted in certain circumstances. One is on a long voyage where the body may decompose and pose a health hazard to a ship's passengers, an exception noted on Monday by the Tunisian scholar Ahmed al-Gharbi. Another is if there is a risk of enemies digging up a land grave and exhuming or mutilating the body.
Dr Saud al-Fanisan, former dean of the faculty of sharia law in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said that if a body was buried at sea it should be protected from fish. In the words of alislam.org, the body should be lowered into the water "in a vessel of clay or with a weight tied to its feet".
Mohammed al-Qubaisi, Dubai's grand mufti, said of Bin Laden's burial: "They can say they buried him at sea, but they cannot say they did it according to Islam. Sea burials are permissible for Muslims in extraordinary circumstances. This is not one of them."
Abdul-Sattar al-Janabi, who preaches at Baghdad's Abu Hanifa mosque, said: "What was done by the Americans is forbidden by Islam and might provoke some Muslims. It is not acceptable and it is almost a crime to throw the body of a Muslim man into the sea. The body of Bin Laden should have been handed over to his family to look for a country to bury him."
The radical Lebanon-based cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed said: "The Americans want to humiliate Muslims through this burial, and I don't think this is in the interest of the US administration."
The Egyptian analyst and lawyer Montasser el-Zayat said Bin Laden's sea burial was designed to prevent his grave from becoming a shrine. But an option was an unmarked grave. "They don't want to see him become a symbol," he said. "But he is already a symbol in people's hearts."

Bin Laden was found at luxury Pakistan compound

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. forces finally found al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden not in a mountain cave on Afghanistan's border, but with his youngest wife in a million-dollar compound in a summer resort just over an hour's drive from Pakistan's capital, U.S. officials said.
A small U.S. team conducted a night-time helicopter raid on the compound early on Monday. After 40 minutes of fighting, bin Laden and an adult son, one unidentified woman and two men were dead, the officials said.
U.S. forces were led to the fortress-like three-story building after more than four years tracking one of bin Laden's most trusted couriers, whom U.S. officials said was identified by men captured after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
"Detainees also identified this man as one of the few al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden. They indicated he might be living with or protected by bin Laden," a senior administration official said in a briefing for reporters.
Bin Laden was finally found -- more than 9-1/2 years after the 2001 attacks on the United States -- after authorities discovered in August 2010 that the courier lived with his brother and their families in an unusual and extremely high-security building, officials said.
They said the courier and his brother were among those killed in the raid.
"When we saw the compound where the brothers lived, we were shocked by what we saw: an extraordinarily unique compound," a senior administration official said.
"The bottom line of our collection and our analysis was that we had high confidence that the compound harbored a high-value terrorist target. The experts who worked this issue for years assessed that there was a strong probability that the terrorist who was hiding there was Osama bin Laden," another administration official said.
The home is in Abbottabad, a town about 35 miles north of Islamabad, that is relatively affluent and home to many retired members of Pakistan's military.
It was a far cry from the popular notion of bin Laden hiding in some mountain cave on the rugged and inaccessible Afghan-Pakistan border -- an image often evoked by officials up to and including former President George W. Bush.
The building, about eight times the size of other nearby houses, sat on a large plot of land that was relatively secluded when it was built in 2005. When it was constructed, it was on the outskirts of Abbottabad's center, at the end of a dirt road, but some other homes have been built nearby in the six years since it went up, officials said.
WALLS TOPPED WITH BARBED WIRE
Intense security measures included 12- to 18-foot outer walls topped with barbed wire and internal walls that sectioned off different parts of the compound, officials said. Two security gates restricted access, and residents burned their trash, rather than leaving it for collection as did their neighbors, officials said.
Few windows of the three-story home faced the outside of the compound, and a terrace had a seven-foot (2.1 meter) privacy wall, officials said.
"It is also noteworthy that the property is valued at approximately $1 million but has no telephone or Internet service connected to it," an administration official said. "The brothers had no explainable source of wealth."
U.S. analysts realized that a third family lived there in addition to the two brothers, and the age and makeup of the third family matched those of the relatives -- including his youngest wife -- they believed would be living with bin Laden.
"Everything we saw, the extremely elaborate operational security, the brothers' background and their behavior and the location of the compound itself was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden's hide-out to look like," another Obama administration official said.
Abbottabad is a popular summer resort, located in a valley surrounded by green hills near Pakistani Kashmir. Islamist militants, particularly those fighting in Indian-controlled Kashmir, used to have training camps near the town.
(Editing by Mary Milliken, Will Dunham and Mark Trevelyan)

Bin Laden Is Dead, President Obama Says

By HELENE COOPER

Doug Mills/The New York TimesPresident Obama made an announcement at the White House on Sunday.

WASHINGTON — President Obama announced late Sunday that Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, was killed in a firefight during an operation he ordered inside Pakistan, ending a 10 year manhunt for the world’s most wanted terrorist. American officials were in possession of his body, he said.
The fate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Al Qaeda number two in command, was unclear.
The death of Mr. Bin Laden is a huge punctuation in the American-led war on terrorism. What remains to be seen is whether the death of the leader of Al Qaeda galvanizes his followers by turning him into a martyr, or whether it serves as a turning of the page in the war in Afghanistan and gives further impetus to the Obama administration to bring American troops home.
One American official said that American forces, acting on intelligence, launched a “targeted assault” that killed Mr. Bin Laden, whose ability to elude capture for so long deeply frustrated the Bush administration.
The news of the death of the leader of Al Qaeda was bound to electrify the world, particularly as it comes a full decade after American forces, under President Bush, launched their all-out assault to find the man responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Since those attacks, Mr. bin Laden was able to elude capture by hiding out in the mountains of Afghanistan and elsewhere. He initially escaped from Tora Bora in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan after an American invasion routed the Taliban, his protectors. Since then, he issued some 30 messages, in audio, video or electronic text. Intelligence officials believe they were passed from hand to hand repeatedly to obscure any trail back to his hiding place. Even while in hiding, he remained a potent symbolic figure. And American officials believe, based on intercepted communications from second- and third-tier Qaeda operatives, that he also still helped shape Al Qaeda’s strategy.

WASHINGTON – Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States, is dead, and the U.S. is in possession of his body, a person familiar with the situation said late Sunday.
President Barack Obama was expected to address the nation on the developments Sunday night.
Two senior counterterrorism officials confirmed that bin Laden was killed in Pakistan last week. One said bin Laden was killed in a ground operation, not by a Predator drone. Both said the operation was based on U.S. intelligence, and both said the U.S. is in possession of bin Laden's body.
Officials long believed bin Laden, the most wanted man in the world, was hiding a mountainous region along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak ahead of the president.
The development comes just months before the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Centers and Pentagon, orchestrated by bin Laden's al-Qaida organization, that killed more than 3,000 people.
The attacks set off a chain of events that led the United States into wars in Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and America's entire intelligence apparatus was overhauled to counter the threat of more terror attacks at home.
Al-Qaida organization was also blamed for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 231 people and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 American sailors in Yemen, as well as countless other plots, some successful and some foiled.

Osama bin Laden Killed; ID Confirmed by DNA Testing

Osama bin Laden is shown in this Dec. 24, 1998 file photo. AP Photo

By DEAN SCHABNER

May 1, 2011

Osama bin Laden, hunted as the mastermind behind the worst-ever terrorist attack on U.S. soil, has been killed, sources told ABC News.
Specific details of how and where the al Qaeda mastermind was killed were not immediately available, but sources said U.S. forces have the body and DNA testing confirmed that it was bin Laden.
His death brings to an end a tumultuous life that saw bin Laden go from being the carefree son of a Saudi billionaire, to terrorist leader and the most wanted man in the world.
Bin Laden created and funded the al Qaeda terror network, which was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The Saudi exile had been a man on the run since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan overthrew the ruling Taliban regime, which harbored bin Laden.
In a video filmed two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, bin Laden gloated about the attack, saying it had exceeded even his "optimistic" calculations.
"Our terrorism is against America. Our terrorism is a blessed terrorism to prevent the unjust person from committing injustice and to stop American support for Israel, which kills our sons," he said in the video.
Long before the Sept. 11 attacks, bin Laden was known as an enemy of the United States. He was suspected of playing large roles in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. Embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in October 2000.

AP Photo

Osama bin Laden is shown in this Dec. 24,... View Full Size

AP Photo

Osama bin Laden is shown in this Dec. 24, 1998 file photo.

In addition, authorities say bin Laden and his al Qaeda network were involved in previous attacks against U.S. interests -- including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, failed plots to kill President Clinton and the pope, and attacks on U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and Somalia.
Bin Laden also used his millions to bankroll terrorist training camps in Sudan, the Philippines and Afghanistan, sending "holy warriors" to foment revolution and fight with fundamentalist Muslim forces across North Africa, in Chechnya, Tajikistan and Bosnia.
Until the capture of one of his top al Qaeda lieutenants in March 2003, there had been no confirmation of his whereabouts -- or even that he was still alive -- since late 2001, when he appeared in a series of videotapes later released to news organizations.
In recent years, several audio recordings of bin Laden have been authenticated by U.S. officials and made public. In an 18-minute videotape weeks before the 2004 U.S. presidential election, bin Laden threatened fresh attacks on the United States as well as his intent to push America into bankruptcy.
Young Man With a Privileged Life
Born in 1957, bin Laden was a son of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest construction magnate. Saudi sources remembered him as a typical young man whose intense religiosity began to emerge as he grew fascinated with the ancient mosques of Mecca and Medina, which his family's company was involved in rebuilding.
Bin Laden attended schools in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, and was encouraged to marry early, at the age of 17, to a Syrian girl and family relation. She was to be the first of several wives. He attended King Abdul-Aziz University and was slated to join the family business. He soon chose a different path, however.
Former classmates of bin Laden recall him as a frequent patron of nightclubs, who drank and caroused with his Saudi royalty cohorts. Yet it was also at the university that bin Laden met the Muslim fundamentalist Sheik Abdullah Azzam, perhaps his first teacher of religious politics and his earliest radical influence.

Osama bin Laden is dead, Obama announces

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind al-Qaida, is dead, President Obama to announce from the White House

• Richard Adams
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 May 2011 04.00 BST
• Article history

Osama bin Laden has been killed by US operatives in Pakistan, President Obama announced. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Osama bin Laden, the criminal mastermind behind al-Qaida and the world's most sought-after terrorist since the attacks of 11 September 2001, has been killed by a US operation, President Barack Obama will announce late on Sunday night. Osama's body is in possession of the US, having been killed in Pakistan as the result of a US special forces and CIA operation, according to the first leaks of reporting from the US television networks. President Obama is to make a highly unusual Sunday night live statement to announce the news, around 11pm eastern time. The news comes eight years to the day that President George Bush declared "Mission accomplished" in Iraq. As president, Bush declared he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive" – but it is now the unlikely figure of Barack Obama who announces the final triumph as the US commander in chief. This is a turning point in the global "war on terrorism" that has been waged since 9/11 – and the news will reverberate around the world. The news comes as an unparalleled boost for US foreign policy, the key aim of which since 2001 has been the disarming and dismemberment of al-Qaida, and coincidentally probably insures the re-election of Obama in the 2012 presidential contest. As a candidate, during the 2008 election campaign Obama repeatedly vowed: "We will kill Osama bin Laden." And so it proved.