Osama terror lore lives on

Two days after US Navy Seals eliminated Osama and apparently gave him a burial at sea, people along the Gujarat coast woke up to rumours that his sea-swept body had washed ashore nearby.

The Seals’ swift and deadly mission has triggered shock, suspense and a bundle of contradictory feelings and comments around the globe. Wisecracks and jokes too abound, particularly on the Internet.

But wait, there are bigger ‘surprises.’  Sample this: Osama was ‘bundled’ by the army and ISI, flown to Washington on April 14 and was ‘shot’ by ‘a single bullet’ on April 29 after interrogation! This is what J&K National Panthers Party chairman Bhim Singh and senior Supreme Court attorney, said in a letter addressed to US President Barack Obama on May 4. Singh has questioned the ‘drama’ of the US helicopters attacking an ‘isolated building’ in Abbottabad.

The mystery of the US helicopters in Abbottabad will be debated endlessly but that has not stopped people from cracking Osama jokes. Websites are replete with them. Some of them tickle the funny bone, but this one takes the cake: “No one is safe in Pakistan, not even Osama; everyone is safe in India, even Ajmal Kasab!”

While some of Hollywood action movie directors have reworked the scripts of their ‘suspense thrillers’ following the May 2 incident, Bollywood copy cats have also put their thinking caps on. Trying to cash in on the Osama drama, the producer of ‘Tere Bin Laden’ is thinking of a re-release.

The Osama household has over 26 of his children and other kith and kin, some of them engaged in activity that Osama would have hated. One is Wafah Dufour, the al-Qaeda leader’s model niece. “She's not the model niece bin Laden looked for, but she is modeling,” a wag has tweeted. Dufour, who has taken her mother’s name, has appeared on the covers of glossy western magazines.

If Osama were to eschew the gun and face the cameras, the lanky 6 foot 4 (an FBI estimate) could have made it to magazine covers in a different way.