How tall osama bin laden

Pakistani authorities later demolished the compound in February to prevent it from becoming a neo-Islamist shrine. Bin Laden is most well known for his role in masterminding the September 11 attacks, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 3, and prompted the United States to initiate the War on Terror.

He subsequently became the subject of a decade-long international manhunt. President Barack Obama. Under his leadership, the al-Qaeda organization was responsible for, in addition to the September 11 attacks in the United States, many other mass-casualty attacks worldwide.

On June 15, , federal prosecutors of the United States of America officially dropped all criminal charges against Osama bin Laden following his death in May.

In April , President Obama ordered a covert operation to kill or capture bin Laden. In April , various U. Bin Laden's mansion was located 1. Google Earth maps show that the compound was not present in , but it was present on images taken in In a letter, bin Laden chastised followers who had reinterpreted al-tatarrus—an Islamic doctrine meant to excuse the unintended killing of non-combatants in unusual circumstances—to justify routine massacres of Muslim civilians, which had turned Muslims against the extremist movement.

Of the groups affiliated with al-Qaida, Bin Laden condemned Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan for an attack on members of a hostile tribe, declaring that "the operation is not justified, as there were casualties of noncombatants. In Yemen, Bin Laden urged his allies to seek a "truce" that would bring the country "stability" or would at least "show the people that we are careful in keeping He instructed his followers around the world to focus on education and persuasion rather than "entering into confrontations" with Islamic political parties.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in December that officials had had no reliable information on bin Laden's whereabouts for years. Testifying to the U. Congress, he said that bin Laden had become an "iconic figure, whose survival emboldens al-Qaeda as a franchising organization across the world", and that Obama's deployment of 30, extra troops to Afghanistan meant that success would be possible. According to him, killing or capturing bin Laden would not spell the end of al-Qaeda, but the movement could not be eradicated while he remained at large.

On October 7, , in the second presidential debate, on foreign policy, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged, "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority. President Obama rejected the Bush administration's policy on bin Laden that "conflated all terror threats from al-Qaeda to Hamas to Hezbollah," replacing it with "a covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaeda and its spawn.

Immediately after the September 11 attacks, U. Through two other tapes aired by Al Jazeera in , Osama bin Laden announced, "I am the one in charge of the nineteen brothers. I was responsible for entrusting the nineteen brothers Identified motivations of the September 11 attacks include the support of Israel by the United States, presence of the U.

The Washington Post also reported that the CIA unit composed of special operations paramilitary forces dedicated to capturing bin Laden was shut down in late Bin Laden's overall strategy for achieving his goals against much larger enemies such as the Soviet Union and United States was to lure them into a long war of attrition in Muslim countries, attracting large numbers of jihadists who would never surrender.

He believed this would lead to economic collapse of the enemy countries, by "bleeding" them dry. Al-Qaeda manuals express this strategy. In a tape broadcast by al-Jazeera, bin Laden spoke of "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy". In the video, bin Laden abandoned his denials without retracting past statements. In it he said he had personally directed the nineteen hijackers. In the minute tape, played on Al-Jazeera, four days before the American presidential election, bin Laden accused U.

President George W. Bush of negligence in the hijacking of the planes on September According to the tapes, bin Laden claimed he was inspired to destroy the World Trade Center after watching the destruction of towers in Lebanon by Israel during the Lebanon War. A major component of bin Laden's ideology was the concept that civilians from enemy countries, including women and children, were legitimate targets for jihadists to kill.

Bin Laden's other known wives were Khadijah Sharif married , divorced s ; Khairiah Sabar married ; Siham Sabar married ; and Amal al-Sadah married Some sources also list a sixth wife, name unknown, whose marriage to bin Laden was annulled soon after the ceremony. Bin Laden fathered between 20 and 26 children with his wives.

Many of bin Laden's children fled to Iran following the September 11 attacks and as of , Iranian authorities reportedly continue to control their movements. A former U. State Department official in October described Bosnia and Herzegovina as a safe haven for terrorists, and asserted that militant elements of the former Sarajevo government were protecting extremists, some with ties to Osama bin Laden.

In , Rzeczpospolita, one of the largest Polish daily newspapers, had reported that intelligence services of the Nordic-Polish SFOR Brigade suspected that a center for training terrorists from Islamic countries was located in the Bocina Donja village near Maglaj in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In , hundreds of volunteers joined an "all-mujahedeen unit" called El Moujahed in an abandoned hillside factory, a compound with a hospital and prayer hall.

Bin Laden initially denied involvement in the attacks. On September 16, , bin Laden read a statement later broadcast by Qatar's Al Jazeera satellite channel denying responsibility for the attack. In a videotape recovered by U. The tape was broadcast on various news networks on December 13, The merits of this translation have been disputed.

Arabist Dr. Abdel El M. Husseini stated: "This translation is very problematic. At the most important places where it is held to prove the guilt of bin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic. Bush, in direct response to the September 11 attacks, but which was again based on the indictment for the embassy attack. Bin Laden was among a group of thirteen fugitive terrorists wanted on that latter list for questioning about the embassy bombings.

Bin Laden remains the only fugitive ever to be listed on both FBI fugitive lists. Despite the multiple indictments listed above and multiple requests, the Taliban refused to extradite Osama bin Laden. They did however offer to try him before an Islamic court if evidence of Osama bin Laden's involvement in the September 11 attacks was provided.

It was not until eight days after the bombing of Afghanistan began in October that the Taliban finally did offer to turn over Osama bin Laden to a third-party country for trial in return for the United States ending the bombing. This offer was rejected by President Bush stating that this was no longer negotiable, with Bush responding "there's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty. According to The Washington Post, the U. Intelligence officials assembled what they believed to be decisive evidence, from contemporary and subsequent interrogations and intercepted communications, that bin Laden began the Battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex along Afghanistan's mountainous eastern border.

Bush stated, "I want justice. There is an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted dead or alive' ". Subsequently, bin Laden retreated further from public contact to avoid capture. Numerous speculative press reports were issued about his whereabouts or even death; some placed bin Laden in different locations during overlapping time periods.

None were ever definitively proven. After military offensives in Afghanistan failed to uncover his whereabouts, Pakistan was regularly identified as his suspected hiding place. Some of the conflicting reports regarding bin Laden's whereabouts and mistaken claims about his death follow:.

The U. State Department accused Sudan of being a "sponsor of international terrorism" and bin Laden of operating "terrorist training camps in the Sudanese desert". According to Sudan officials, however, this stance became obsolete as the Islamist political leader Hassan al-Turabi lost influence in their country. The Sudanese wanted to engage with the U. It was not until that the State Department authorized U. The plan was foiled by the arrest of the Jordanian terrorist cell, the sinking of the explosive-filled skiff intended to target the destroyer, and the arrest of Ahmed Ressam.

In , before the September 11 attacks, Paul Bremer characterized the Clinton administration as "correctly focused on bin Laden", while Robert Oakley criticized their "obsession with Osama". According to Middle East intelligence reports, bin Laden financed small convoys of recruits from the Arab world through his businesses in Sudan.

Among them was Karim Said Atmani, who was identified by authorities as the document forger for a group of Algerians accused of plotting the bombings in the United States. He is a former roommate of Ahmed Ressam, the man arrested at the Canadian-U. He was convicted of colluding with Osama bin Laden by a French court. In , the press reported that bin Laden and his Tunisian assistant Mehrez Aodouni were granted citizenship and Bosnian passports in by the government in Sarajevo.

This information was denied by the Bosnian government following the September 11 attacks, but it was later found that Aodouni was arrested in Turkey and that at that time he possessed the Bosnian passport. Following this revelation, a new explanation was given that bin Laden "did not personally collect his Bosnian passport" and that officials at the Bosnian embassy in Vienna, which issued the passport, could not have known who bin Laden was at the time. The three, one of whom was identified as Imad El Misri, were Egyptian nationals.

The paper said that two of the suspects were holding Bosnian passports. Bin Laden became the th person listed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, when he was added on June 7, , following his indictment along with others for capital crimes in the embassy attacks.

Attempts at assassination and requests for the extradition of bin Laden from the Taliban of Afghanistan were met with failure before the bombing of Afghanistan in October In , U.

President Bill Clinton convinced the United Nations to impose sanctions against Afghanistan in an attempt to force the Taliban to extradite him. Bin Laden was heavily anti-Semitic, stating that most of the negative events that occurred in the world were the direct result of Jewish actions. In a December interview with Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, bin Laden stated that Operation Desert Fox was proof that Israeli Jews controlled the governments of the United States and United Kingdom, directing them to kill as many Muslims as they could.

In a letter released in late , he stated that Jews controlled the civilian media outlets, politics, and economic institutions of the United States. He stated that Jews and Muslims could never get along and that war was "inevitable" between them, and further accused the U. He claimed that the U. State Department and U. Department of Defense were controlled by Jews, for the sole purpose of serving the Israeli state's goals.

He often delivered warnings against alleged Jewish conspiracies: "These Jews are masters of usury and leaders in treachery. They will leave you nothing, either in this world or the next. America, and Israel" as the four principal "enemies of Islam" at ideology classes of bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization.

In February , Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri co-signed a fatwa in the name of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, which declared the killing of North Americans and their allies an "individual duty for every Muslim" to "liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the holy mosque in Mecca from their grip". At the public announcement of the fatwa bin Laden announced that North Americans are "very easy targets".

He told the attending journalists, "You will see the results of this in a very short time. Embassy bombings were a series of attacks that occurred on August 7, , in which hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous truck bomb explosions at the United States embassies in the major East African cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya.

The attacks were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, brought Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to the attention of the United States public for the first time. Al-Qaeda later claimed responsibility for the bombings. In retaliation for the embassy bombings, President Bill Clinton ordered a series of cruise missile strikes on bin Laden-related targets in Sudan and Afghanistan on August 20, In December , the Director of Central Intelligence Counterterrorist Center reported to President Clinton that al-Qaeda was preparing for attacks in the United States of America, including the training of personnel to hijack aircraft.

On June 7, , the U. He claimed bin Laden had used Albania as a "launchpad for violence" in the region and Europe. On March 16, , Libya issued the first official Interpol arrest warrant against bin Laden and three other people. They were charged for killing Silvan Becker, agent of Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, in the Terrorism Department, and his wife Vera in Libya on March 10, Bin Laden was still wanted by the Libyan government at the time of his death.

Osama bin Laden was first indicted by a grand jury of the United States on June 8, on a charges of "conspiracy to attack defense utilities of the United States" and prosecutors further charged that bin Laden was the head of the terrorist organization called al-Qaeda, and that he was a major financial backer of Islamic fighters worldwide.

The evidence against bin Laden included courtroom testimony by former al-Qaeda members and satellite phone records, from a phone purchased for him by al-Qaeda procurement agent Ziyad Khaleel in the United States.

However the Taliban ruled not to extradite Bin Laden on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence published in the indictments and that non-Muslim courts lacked standing to try Muslims.

Shortly after the September 11 attacks it was revealed that President Clinton had signed a directive authorizing the CIA and specifically their elite Special Activities Division to apprehend bin Laden and bring him to the United States to stand trial after the United States embassy bombings in Africa; if taking bin Laden alive was deemed impossible, then deadly force was authorized.

On August 20, , 66 cruise missiles launched by United States Navy ships in the Arabian Sea struck bin Laden's training camps near Khost in Afghanistan, missing him by a few hours. Nasser al-Bahri, who was bin Laden's personal bodyguard from —, details bin Laden's personal life in his memoir.

He describes him as a frugal man and strict father, who enjoyed taking his large family on shooting trips and picnics in the desert. In , he condemned the United States for its hypocrisy in not labeling the bombing of Hiroshima as terrorism. In November , he maintained that revenge killing of Americans was justified because he claimed that Islamic law allows believers to attack invaders even when the enemy uses human shields.

However, according to Rodenbeck, "this classical position was originally intended as a legal justification for the accidental killings of civilians under very limited circumstances — not as a basis for the intentional targeting of noncombatants.

It has been claimed that bin Laden funded the Luxor massacre of November 17, , which killed 62 civilians, and outraged the Egyptian public.

In mid, the Northern Alliance threatened to overrun Jalalabad, causing bin Laden to abandon his Najim Jihad compound and move his operations to Tarnak Farms in the south. A Bosnian government search of passport and residency records, conducted at the urging of the United States, revealed other former Mujahideen who were linked to the same Algerian group or to other groups of suspected terrorists, and had lived in the area km 60 mi north of Sarajevo, the capital, in the past few years.

Khalil al-Deek was arrested in Jordan in late December on suspicion of involvement in a plot to blow up tourist sites. A second man with Bosnian citizenship, Hamid Aich, lived in Canada at the same time as Atmani and worked for a charity associated with Osama bin Laden.

December - US forces land in Somalia , spearheading a UN-authorized humanitarian plan to bring in famine relief supplies. Part of their challenge is disarming the various warlords who control the country. Prosecutors charge that bin Laden threw himself into the midst of this conflict, sending some of his followers to Somalia to train the warlords to fight the US troops.

Six Muslim radicals, who US officials suspect have links to bin Laden, are eventually convicted for the bombing. Although bin Laden is named as a possible unindicted co-conspirator, investigators do not recover conclusive evidence that the al Qaeda leader orchestrated the attack.

October - Eighteen US servicemen, part of a humanitarian mission to Somalia, die in an ambush perpetrated by militants who reportedly trained with al Qaeda. His family disowns him. He moves with his children and wives to Afghanistan, where he receives harbor from the Taliban.

The United States indicts bin Laden on charges of training the people involved in the attack that killed 18 US servicemen in Somalia. It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose on us agents to rule us. February - According to court documents, bin Laden orders the militarization of the East African cell of al Qaeda, a move that culminates in the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, , eight years to the day after US troops landed in the Saudi kingdom.

May 29, - Bin Laden issues a statement entitled "The Nuclear Bomb of Islam," under the banner of the "International Islamic Front for Fighting the Jews and Crusaders," in which he states that "it is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God.

November - Is indicted by the United States on counts of murder for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. He claims he was trained in urban warfare and explosives at an Afghanistan camp run by bin Laden. May 29, - Four of bin Laden's alleged supporters are convicted of the bombings of the US embassies in Africa.

December 25, - The Pakistan Observer publishes details of bin Laden's alleged funeral. On the front page, the newspaper reports that an unnamed Taliban leader said bin Laden "had a peaceful natural death in mid-December in the vicinity" of the Tora Bora mountains.

The report says that his death was the result of a "serious lung complication He was laid to rest honorably in his last abode" in a grave prepared according to the beliefs of the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect of Islam to which the Qaeda leader belonged, the report said. December 27, - Afghan officials report that bin Laden is in Pakistan with al Qaeda sympathizers.

January 18, - Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf says that Osama bin Laden might have died of kidney failure in Afghanistan after becoming separated from a dialysis machine he had used in recent years.

March 9, - A Saudi-owned publication quotes one of bin Laden's wives as saying her personal belief is that he is living. The woman, identified only as A. Osama's death cannot be hidden. Bush who promised his people to kill Osama, not knowing that lives are in the hands of God. June 12, - A Russian newspaper publishes what it claims is an interview with Mullah Mohammed Omar. Omar states bin Laden is alive in Afghanistan. The fire from this war will reach America, and it will burn the capital that launched an unjust attack on Muslims.

March 10, - Muslim clerics in Spain issue what they call the world's first fatwa, or Islamic edict, against bin Laden. They call him an apostate and urge others of their faith to denounce him. The ruling is issued by the Islamic Commission of Spain, the main body representing the country's Muslim community. December - The US government admits a "lack of intelligence" on bin Laden's whereabouts, noting he could be in Afghanistan or Pakistan. May 2, - In the early morning hours, a small group of US Forces, including Navy Seals, raid a walled and fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

In the ensuing firefight, bin Laden and three other men die. A woman also dies.