A Kuwaiti academic is stealing the thunder out of the Obama campaign’s favorite talking point in 2012:
Abdullah Al Nafeesi, a former Kuwaiti deputy and political science professor in Kuwait University, said the US lied when it said its forces killed bin Laden and dumped its body in the sea during the May 2011 attack following more than 11 years of a search operation to find the most wanted man in the world.
“The US announcement that Sheikh Osama bin Laden was killed in not true,” Nafeesi told Rotana Khaleejia TV channel in an interview carried by Saudi newspapers.
“I doubt that Sheikh Osama has been killed. I believe that he was kidnapped and is still alive. It does not make sense that a big power like the US searches for a man for 11 years and when it finds him, it just shoots him. This is an amateur rather than professional work. Otherwise what is the use of having all this suffering and spending billions all this time to find the man? He has been abducted and is now with them but they made us think that he was killed and dumped in the sea.”
Experts told Al-Arabiya that the scenario is unlikely because news would have dribbled out by now from the leaky U.S. government. Michael Ryan, author of Decoding al-Qaeda’s Strategy: The Deep Battle Against America, told the network that the decision to kill bin Laden was probably spontaneous. “If the order was capture first but kill if you need to… one can make a very logical case that the operators on the ground made the logical choice in light of having just lost a helicopter and wanting to make sure that this mission was accomplished,” Ryan said. “If anything else happened, I believe we would have some third-party evidence by now.”
Rumors are fueled by the fact that the U.S. never released photos of Osama’s body even when requested by news outlets, though photos purporting to show bin Laden’s body were released by Pakistani TV.
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