US officials said the Navy SEALs team who killed Osama bin Laden did so because he resisted capture. They also said bin Laden did not surrender when offered the opportunity to do so.

This was the account US officials gave shortly after President Barack Obama announced bin Laden’s death.

However, later accounts admitted that bin Laden wasn’t armed.

Skeptics immediately began to question how bin Laden could have resisted capture without being armed. Critics also began to accuse to US of carrying out a cold-blooded assassination against bin Laden.

Bin Laden “has been subject to summary execution, and what is now appearing after a good deal of disinformation from the White House is it may well have been a cold-blooded assassination,” said Australian human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson.

The latest details now suggest that bin Laden resisted capture by lunging towards his weapons – an AK-47 and a Makarov pistol – or that the weapons were at least within his arm’s reach, reported the New York Times.

Also, contrary to the early White House account of the Navy SEALs being under heavy fire, it has now been revealed that only one person – bin Laden’s courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti – opened fire on US forces. Ironically, it was al-Kuwaiti’s trail that provided the US with the key clues used to locate bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

Barack obama The New York Times