Since US President Barack Obama claimed last Sunday that Osama Bin Laden was dead, a flood of versions of what actually happened made it into the news. Some said he was not dead; others said he had died years ago, his body put into hibernation and then taken away; still others claimed that he had died a few days before the US action forcing a frustrated United States to stage a fake military operation after its ten-year manhunt.
US reticence over the event helped sow confusion. In a quick succession, different versions were made public: Osama was armed; he was not armed; he used a woman as a shield.
The refusal to publish pictures of the dead body did not help the US case either and could have led to the birth of a new myth like that of Elvis Presley.
Now events have been confirmed by an authoritative source, al Qaeda itself.
A US monitoring group is in fact reporting that Islamist websites are abuzz with the news of their leader’s death, with a flurry of promises to avenge his blood in attacks against the United States.