Osama unarmed when shot dead – US

 Pakistan blamed worldwide intelligence lapses for a failure to detect Osama bin Laden living near its capital, while Washington worked to establish whether its ally had sheltered the al Qaeda leader.

A US acknowledgement bin Laden was unarmed when shot dead in Monday’s raid in Abbottabad raised accusations Washington had violated international law. Exact circumstances of his death remained unclear and could yet fuel controversy, especially in the Muslim world.

Pakistan faced national embarrassment, a leading Islamabad newspaper said, in explaining how the world’s most-wanted man was able to live for years in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, just north of the capital.

Islamabad vehemently denies it sheltered bin Laden.

“There is an intelligence failure of the whole world, not just Pakistan alone,” Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani told reporters in Paris. “(If there are) ... lapses from the Pakistan side, that means there are lapses from the whole world.”

The revelation that bin Laden was unarmed contradicted an earlier US account that he had participated in a firefight with the helicopter-borne American commandos.

Al Arabiya television went further, suggesting the architect of the 9/11 attacks was first taken prisoner and then shot.

“A security source in the Pakistani security quoted the daughter of Osama bin Laden that the leader of al Qaeda was not killed inside his house, but had been arrested and was killed later,” the Arabic television station said.

White House spokesman Jay Carney on Tuesday cited the “fog of war” -- a phrase suggested by a reporter -- as a reason for the initial misinformation.

Bin Laden’s killing and the swift burial of his body at sea have produced some criticism in the Muslim world and accusations Washington acted outside international law.

“The Americans behaved in the same way as bin Laden: with treachery and baseness,” Husayn al-Sawaf, 25, a playwright, said in Cairo. “They should’ve tried him in a court. As for his burial, that’s not Islamic. He should’ve been buried in soil.”

But there has been no sign of mass protests or violent reaction on the streets in south Asia or the Middle East, where Islamist militancy appears to have been eclipsed by pro-democracy movements sweeping the region.

Washington will weigh sensitivities in the Muslim world when it decides whether to release photographs of bin Laden’s body which could provide proof for sceptics of his death.

Bin Laden was shot in the head.

“It’s fair to say that it’s a gruesome photograph,” Carney said. “I’ll be candid. There are sensitivities here in terms of the appropriateness of releasing photographs.”

There has been little questioning of the operation in the United States, where bin Laden’s killing was greeted with street celebrations. was there the possibility of catching osama alive that intelligent avoided