Pakistan UpdateSuicide bombers receive no death rituals

• Osama bin Laden is shown in a frame grab from an undated video recovered from his compound in Abbottabad after his May 2, 2011, death. Some of the thousands of documents recovered from his compound were released May 3. [Via Reuters]
• A policeman looks on as the building where al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed is demolished in Abbottabad February 26. [REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood]

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WASHINGTON – Seventeen of the thousands of documents seized from the compound of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 were released May 3, one day after the first anniversary of the al-Qaeda leader’s death.
The documents – provided by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), and totalling 175 pages in the original Arabic and 197 pages in the English translation – describe some of the inner workings of the terrorist organisation, including internal disputes, advice to affiliate groups, and the concerns of key leaders.
Many of the documents are correspondence written by bin Laden or sent to him by others, either in final electronic form or as draft letters. Some of the documents are not complete, with authorship unclear. The earliest documents released are from September 2006, while the last are dated April 2011.
Besides bin Laden, authors include al-Qaeda leaders Mahmud/Atiyya (Abu Abd al-Rahman) and Abu Yahya al-Libi (Hasan Qa’id); al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn; Mukhtar Abu al-Zubayr, leader of the Somali militant group Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahidin; Abu Basir (Nasir al-Wuhayshi), leader of the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leader Hakimullah Mehsud.
Analysis of the documents contained in a CTC study, Letters from Abbottabad, f