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One thing U.S. forces couldn't do in their in-and-out mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Ladin was to take a lot of prisoners. Or any, for that matter, even though several members of Bin Laden's family survived the raid on his Abbottabad compound. Now, Pakistan says it has taken into custody 10 members of the Bin Laden clan, including one of his wives and up to eight of his children, and it won't hand them over to the United States.
The original goal of the raid was to capture the family as well as the patriarch, but when one helicopter crash-landed in the compound, there wasn't enough room on board the rest to fly the prisoners out. The unnamed Pakistani intelligence official, "said one of Osama bin Laden's daughters had seen her father being shot dead by U.S. forces," Reuters reports. "The relatives -- one of bin Laden's wives and up to eight children -- will be interrogated and then probably turned over to their countries of origin, and not the United States, in accordance with Pakistani law, he said." It was not reported what those countries were.
That news comes as Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari defended his country's inaction in the killing of Bin Laden. "Although the events of Sunday were not a joint operation, a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama Bin Laden as a continuing threat to the civilized world," Ali Zardari wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.