Pakistan hits back over bin Laden furore

ABBOTTABAD, Tuesday

Pakistan's president on Tuesday rejected as "baseless" charges that his country extends safe haven to extremists and insisted its long-term help was crucial to the US triumph in gunning down Osama bin Laden.

Asif Ali Zardari's defence came after Washington warned it would probe how the Al-Qaeda kingpin managed to live in undetected luxury in Pakistan, as gripping new details emerged about the US commando raid that killed him.

Officials said DNA tests had proven conclusively that the man shot dead by US special forces in Abbottabad was indeed the Islamist terror mastermind who boasted about the deaths of 3,000 people in the September 11 attacks of 2001.

President Barack Obama's security team were Tuesday debating whether to release a photo of the fugitive terror chief's corpse to scotch any conspiracy theories, an official told AFP requesting anonymity.

Bin Laden's killing by helicopter-borne US Navy SEAL commandos was the climax of years of painstaking intelligence work, picking up the trail from the mountains of Afghanistan to a palatial villa in a Pakistani garrison town.

Obama's top anti-terror adviser John Brennan said it was "inconceivable" that bin Laden did not enjoy a support network in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation allied uneasily to the US-led war in neighbouring Afghanistan.

US analysts were scouring documents and computer equipment seized from bin Laden's hideout for evidence of such a network in Pakistan, Brennan told ABC television late Tuesday.

After Sunday night's public celebrations in New York and Washington, the mood among some US lawmakers turned angry amid demands to know how bin Laden lived unmolested in a country that receives billions of dollars of US aid.

Leafy Abbottabad, home to the Pakistani equivalent of the West Point and Sandhurst military academies, is popular with retired military personnel and tourists alike, and lies just two hours' drive north of Islamabad.

Pakistani intelligence officials said the nation's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had no idea bin Laden was holed-up in the area, despite raiding the compound in 2003 while it was still under construction.

One unnamed ISI official told AFP it was an "embarrassment" but said bin Laden's death on Pakistani soil should not detract from the agency's successes in fighting militancy.

In an opinion piece written for Tuesday's Washington Post, the Pakistani president said the criticism was groundless.

"Some in the US press have suggested that Pakistan lacked vitality in its pursuit of terrorism, or worse yet that we were disingenuous and actually protected the terrorists we claimed to be pursuing," Zardari said.

"Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn't reflect fact."

Zardari acknowledged that the US commandos carried out the Abbottabad raid without Pakistani collaboration -- but stressed that Islamabad had initially helped to identify the Al-Qaeda courier who led them to bin Laden.

Overall, he wrote, "a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden as a continuing threat to the civilised world".

In an interview with AFP, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani sidestepped questions over how bin Laden had gone undetected.