Without substantiating its claim, Iran said that it had “evidence†that Osama Bin Laden died of illness well before the assault on May 1 by US Special Forces in Pakistan.
"We have accurate information that Bin Laden died of illness some time ago," Heydar Moslehi, Iran’s Intelligence Minister, told the FARS News Agency. "If the US military and intelligence apparatus have really arrested or killed bin Laden, why don’t they show him (his dead body) why have they thrown his corpse into the sea?"
Mr. Moslehi produced no evidence to support his claim. There was general agreement after he made his remarks that Iran was seeking to needle the United States, and to score points with Muslims at a time when its own relationship with Sunni leaders in the Gulf States is fraught.
Osama Bin Laden’s corpse was buried with appropriate Muslim rituals in the North Arabian Sea less than 24 hours after the operation in the garrison city of Abbottabad, some 35 miles from Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad.
President Barack Obama of the United States said that he had decided against releasing photographs of Bin laden’s body because that would have been "inflammatory," and would create anti-US sentiments across the Muslim world.
The Obama Administration has given several versions of the sequence of how US Navy SEALs killed Bin Laden. It has asserted that a DNA test proved that the corpse belonged to Bin Laden. It also said that a young daughter of Bin Laden identified his body positively.
While the US military said that it performed an autopsy to dispel allegations that Bin Laden was not killed by American forces, in the previous similar cases of terrorist deaths, the US immediately released of pictures as evidence of the killings. Pictures of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s dead body, video footage of Saddam Hussein’s hanging, and photographs of Hussein’s two dead sons were given to the media as evidence.
But none of these people had the sort of international following that Osama Bin Laden did.