White House debates releasing Bin Laden photo

[1]

Senior US officials were on Tuesday holding delicate discussions on whether to prove Osama bin Laden's death to the world by releasing a photo of his corpse after he was shot dead by special forces.

President Barack Obama's security team was debating whether to release photographic evidence and weighing the possible impact of such a move, an official said on condition of anonymity.

Obama will be aware that the publication of a picture of a dead bin Laden would lay to rest any conspiracy theories in the wider world that Washington somehow faked his killing.

But officials will also be conscious of the potential of stirring a backlash, possibly against US missions abroad, or other targets, in the Muslim world from any picture deemed disrespectful to the dead or disfigured.

Another official said bin Laden was shot above the eye in the raid on a Pakistani compound on Sunday, raising the prospect that any photo released to the public might show gruesome evidence of his death.

One option may be for the White House to release a picture of the Al-Qaeda terror mastermind at the time of his burial at sea on the USS Vinson on the Indian Ocean.

Officials said that bin Laden's body was washed and he was accorded full Islamic rites before being slipped into the Arabian Sea.

US government figures said that the burial at sea was motivated partly out of a desire to avoid any land-based grave site becoming a shrine to a man some supporters now consider a martyr.

A senior official said on Monday that bin Laden was identified during a firefight in the compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.

After he was shot, US intelligence professionals used sophisticated photo recognition techniques to identify bin Laden with 95 per cent certainty.

A later DNA test proved to 99.9 per cent level of certainty that the man found in the compound was indeed the Al-Qaeda kingpin, who is reviled in the United States, officials said.

Soldiers on the ground in the operation also said that bin Laden was identified by other people who were in the compound at the time of the daring airborne attack.