The United States military killed and buried Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011. Osama Bin Laden was the al Qaeda leader responsible for the 9/11 attacks. He was hiding with his family in Abbottabad, Pakistan when the U.S. Special Operations troops took him out during a raid.
The military brought him on the USS Carl Vinson, a ship, after identifying his body and buried him that same day in the northern Arabian Sea.
The U.S. took a lot of precautions when deciding how to bury his body. They felt his grave could become a burial shrine for his followers if buried on land.
They also had to observe the Islamic practice of burying a person within 24 hours of the person’s death. The United States also thought of the question of visual proof, wondering whether they should take pictures of the body as evidence of his death.
While there were inconsistencies about why he wasn’t buried in the ground, and numerous rumours have been circulating, Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic Studies at American University and former Pakistani high commissioner to the U.K. and Ireland said that “The Saudis are inclined toward a form of Islam called Wahhabism, and that this rejects the shrines of prominent people.”
The United States, however, tried to bury him according to Islamic traditions; they washed bin Laden’s body, wrapped him in white cloth, said the ritual prayer with the aid of an Arabic translator and buried him within 24 hours of his death.
President Barack Obama, explaining why he wasn’t releasing the pictures of Osama bin Laden’s body despite having it, said, “It’s important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool,” he said. “That’s not who we are. We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies,” in an interview for 60 minutes on CBS.
This was a drastic change to how the United States treated the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s two sons in 2003, where they released graphic photos of the men’s bodies, embalmed them and left them unburied for about a week while allowing news outlets to photograph them. Despite the criticism, this change showed an attempt from the United States government to honour the Islamic principles of ensuring every Muslim, irrespective of their life, had a peaceful burial.
