'Good day for America'

WASHINGTON (AP):

Proudly declaring the killing of Osama bin Laden "a good day for America," President Barack Obama said yesterday the world was a safer place without the world's most hunted terrorist.

DNA testing helped confirm that American forces in Pakistan had in fact killed the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, US officials said, seeking to erase any doubt about the news that riveted the globe.

Acting on intelligence that bin Laden was holed up in a compound in the city of Abbottabad, Obama ordered a risky, unilateral mission to capture or kill the al-Qaida leader on foreign soil. His counterterror chief, John Brennan, said yesterday that Obama had monitored the raid from the White House Situation Room and expressed relief that elite forces had finally gotten bin Laden without losing any more American lives.

"It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time in the lives of the people who were assembled here," Brennan said from the White House. "The minutes passed like days."

The dramatic developments came just months ahead of the 10-year anniversary of the hijacked-airliner assaults on the United States.

Those attacks took nearly 3,000 lives, led the US into war in Afghanistan and Iraq and forever pierced the notion that the most powerful country on Earth could not be hit on such a ferocious scale.