Pakistan's Intelligence Not Clever

Pakistan's main intelligence agency, the ISI, has said it is embarrassed by its failures on al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

An ISI official told the BBC the compound in Abbottabad where Bin Laden was killed by US forces on Sunday had been raided in 2003. But the compound "was not on our radar" since then, the official said. He gave new details of the raid, saying Bin Laden's young daughter had said she saw her father shot. The ISI official told the BBC's Owen Bennett-Jones in Islamabad that the compound in Abbottabad, just 100km (62 miles) from the capital, was raided when under construction in 2003. It was believed an al-Qaeda operative, Abu Faraj al-Libi, was there.

But since then "the compound was not on our radar, it is an embarrassment for the ISI", the official said. "We're good, but we're not God." The compound is just a few hundred metres from the Pakistan Military Academy - the country's equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst.

The ISI official also gave new or differing accounts of some of the events of Sunday's raid. They included:

There were 17-18 people in the compound at the time of the attack

The Americans took away one person still alive, possibly a Bin Laden son

Those who survived the attack included a wife, a daughter and eight to nine other children, not apparently Bin Laden's; all had their hands tied by the Americans

The surviving Yemeni wife said they had moved to the compound a few months ago

Bin Laden's daughter, aged 12 or 13, saw her father shot

The official said it was thought the Americans wanted to take away the surviving women and children but had to abandon the plan when one of the helicopters malfunctioned. The helicopter was destroyed by the special forces unit.

The US has not commented on anyone it captured or had planned to capture, other than saying it had taken Bin Laden's body. The ISI official said the organisation had recovered some documents from the compound. The CIA is already said to be going through a large number of hard drives and storage devices seized in the raid.

White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan said there had been concern Pakistani forces would deploy to counter the US Navy Seal team conducting the raid but it had avoided any confrontation. The ISI official said: "We were totally caught by surprise. They were in and out before we could react." Our correspondent says residents near the compound in Abbottabad reported that Pakistani soldiers had asked them to switch off their lights an hour before the attack, but the ISI official said this was not true and that it had no advance knowledge of the raid.

Earlier, in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, President Asif Ali Zardari admitted Bin Laden "was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be". But he denied the killing suggested Pakistan was failing in its efforts to tackle terrorism. Mr Zardari said Pakistan had "never been and never will be the hotbed of fanaticism that is often described by the media. Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn't reflect fact," he said. "Pakistan had as much reason to despise al-Qaeda as any nation. The war on terrorism is as much Pakistan's war as it is America's." Pakistani Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir tried to draw a line under the matter, saying: "Who did what is beside the point... This issue of Osama Bin Laden is history."

Bin Laden was America's most wanted man but had eluded capture for more than a decade. US officials say that after DNA tests they are "99.9%" sure that the man they shot and killed and later buried at sea was Bin Laden. US President Barack Obama watched the entire operation in real time in the White House with his national security team.

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said: "The minutes passed like days." CIA director Leon Panetta narrated via a video screen from a separate Washington office, with Bin Laden given the code name Geronimo. Mr Panetta's narration lasted several minutes. "They've reached the target... We have a visual on Geronimo... Geronimo EKIA (enemy killed in action)." Mr Obama said: "We got him." Bin Laden, his son Khalid, trusted personal courier Sheikh Abu Ahmed and the courier's brother were all killed, along with an unidentified woman. Bin Laden was shot above his left eye, blowing away a section of his skull, and was also shot in the chest.

The BBC's Andrew North in Washington says the White House is still discussing whether to release a video that was made of Bin Laden's burial from an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, which some Islamic scholars have said did not conform with tradition. Our correspondent says many people will want proof that Bin Laden is dead but the White House will be concerned about the reaction if the video, and still photographs of the body, are released.

Mr Brennan said U.S officials hope to build on the killing of Osama bin Laden to destroy the al-Qaida terrorist organization. Brennan told NBC's "Today" show the Obama administration is determined "to pummel the rest of al-Qaida." He said the organization already has suffered "severe body blows." He also said in Tuesday's interview that "clearly there was some kind of support network" for bin Laden inside Pakistan. Brennan declined to blame the Pakistani government for that, calling Islamabad "a strong counterterrorism partner." But he also said the Pakistani government is conducting its own investigation into how bin Laden dodged authorities for so long. Brennan said it is "unknown at this point" whether individuals inside the Pakistani government were helping bin Laden.