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New York Times reports US navy Seals killed sole gunman at start of raid, while Pakistan angrily defends its record on terror Further doubts have emerged about the official US account of the raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed, with reports saying US navy Seals were fired on only at the very beginning of the operation and that four of the five people who died, including the al-Qaida leader, were not armed. Meanwhile Pakistan’s foreign secretary has widened his country’s rift with the US over the unilateral American operation by suggesting it could have violated guarantees in the UN charter over national sovereignty. Unnamed US officials told the New York Times that the only shots fired from within the compound in Abbottabad where Bin Laden was sheltering came from his courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who was behind the door of a guesthouse adjacent to the main house. The US raiding party shot and killed Kuwaiti and a woman in the guesthouse, and on entering the main house were not fired on again, the officials said. This is a markedly different version of events to that released by the Pentagon, which said the US forces were “engaged in a firefight throughout the operation”. Separately, MSNBC news reported that four of the five people killed during the operation were unarmed at the time and did not fire a shot. However, the New York Times quoted officials as saying the Seals were in a “threatening and hostile environment” and believed throughout that they were under threat. The next person shot, the courier’s brother, was killed after they believed he was preparing to fire a weapon, while Bin Laden’s son Khalid died as he lunged towards the Seal team. When Bin Laden was shot in a room on the top floor of the house he was not armed but had an AK-47 assault rifle and a Makarov pistol within reach, the paper said. After the building was secured the team seized about 100 USB drives, DVDs, computer disks, five computers and 10 hard drives, the paper added. The continuing disputes about precisely what happened during the raid have threatened to take some of the gloss off what is otherwise viewed as a triumph for Barack Obama and his administration. The White House has already put out a series of corrections to its initial account . The fact it was carried out without any prior warning to Pakistan’s government or military, for fear of leaks, has angered ministers in Islamabad. “There are legal questions that arise in terms of the UN charter,” Salman Bashir told a press conference in Islamabad, apparently referring to sections of the document, and subsequent UN resolutions, guaranteeing national sovereignty. While the US remained a “friend and important partner”, Bashir said, “any other country that would ever act on the assumption that it has the might, and mimic unilateralism of any sorts, will find, at least as far as Pakistan is concerned, that it has made a basic miscalculation”. Bashir dismissed criticism of his country’s intelligence service, the ISI, widely seen in Washington as, at best, not fully committed to tackling al-Qaida. The fact that Bin Laden had been able to evade capture for so long was “a global intelligence failure”, Bashir said, adding: “The ISI has done invaluable work, it has a brilliant track record in combating terror.” Such questions will matter little in New York on Thursday when Obama visits Ground Zero, the site of al-Qaida’s 2001 attacks. During his first visit to the site as president he plans to lay a wreath and meet the families of some of the victims. “He wants to meet with them and share with them this important and significant moment, a bittersweet moment,” Carney said. Obama said on Wednesday night that he had blocked the publication of gruesome pictures of Osama bin Laden’s corpse, telling CBS: “It is 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.” Releasing the pictures would not silence doubters and would be gratuitous, he said. “That’s not who we are. You know, we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies.” America’s discovery of Bin Laden sheltering in an affluent town near Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, rather than scurrying around various hiding places in the lawless tribal land near the Afghan border as long presumed, has not helped relations between the countries. Some US politicians have suggested Washington should cut off billions of dollars in aid. Pakistan has in turn been angered at not being warned of the raid, with intelligence officers saying they would probably refuse any US requests to speak to Bin Laden family members arrested at the compound. The country’s most influential Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has called for rallies on Friday to demand Pakistan’s government withdraw support from US operations targeting al-Qaida and other militants. “Even if there was any sympathy for the Americans, that would dissipate after the way they crushed and violated our sovereignty and our independence,” the party’s leader, Syed Munawar Hasan, told Reuters. Across the border in Afghanistan, a crowd of around 10,000 people rallied in Kabul against the Taliban. A speech by former Afghan intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh was continually interrupted by chants of “Death to the Punjabis” and “Death to the Taliban”. Osama bin Laden United States US military New York Times Barack Obama Obama administration Ground Zero Peter Walker Haroon Siddique guardian.co.uk