Photos show three dead men at bin Laden raid house

ISLAMABAD, (Reuters) – Photographs acquired by Reuters  and taken about an hour after the U.S. assault on Osama bin  Laden’s compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan show three dead men  lying in pools of blood, but no weapons.
The photos, taken by a Pakistani security official who  entered the compound after the early morning raid on Monday,  show two men dressed in traditional Pakistani garb and one in a  t-shirt, with blood streaming from their ears, noses and mouths.
The official, who wished to remain anonymous, sold the  pictures to Reuters.
None of the men looked like bin Laden. U.S. President Barack  Obama decided not to release photos of his body because it could  have incited violence and used as an al Qaeda propaganda tool,  the White House said on Wednesday.
Based on the time-stamps on the pictures, the earliest one  was dated May 2, 2:30 a.m., approximately an hour after the  completion of the raid in which bin Laden was killed.
Other photos, taken hours later at between 5:21 a.m. and  6:43 a.m. show the outside of the trash-strewn compound and the  wreckage of the helicopter the United States abandoned. The tail  assembly is unusual, and could indicate some kind of previously  unknown stealth capability.
Reuters is confident of the authenticity of the purchased  images because details in the photos appear to show a wrecked  helicopter from the assault, matching details from photos taken  independently on Monday.
U.S. forces lost a helicopter in the raid due to a  mechanical problem and later destroyed it.
The pictures are also taken in sequence and are all the same  size in pixels, indicating they have not been tampered with. The  time and date in the photos as recorded in the digital file’s  metadata match lighting conditions for the area as well as the  time and date imprinted on the image itself.
The close-cropped pictures do not show any weapons on the  dead men, but the photos are taken in medium close-up and often  crop out the men’s hands and arms.
One photo shows a computer cable and what looks like a  child’s plastic green and orange water pistol lying under the  right shoulder of one of the dead men. A large pool of blood has  formed under his head.
A second shows another man with a streak of blood running  from his nose across his right cheek and a large band of blood  across his chest.
A third man, in a T-shirt, is on his back in a large pool of  blood which appears to be from a head wound.
U.S. acknowledgment on Tuesday that bin Laden was unarmed  when shot dead had raised accusations Washington had violated  international law. The exact circumstances of his death remained  unclear and could yet fuel controversy, especially in the Muslim  world.
Pakistan faced national embarrassment, a leading Islamabad  newspaper said, in explaining how the world’s most-wanted man  was able to live for years in the military garrison town of  Abbottabad, just north of the capital.
Pakistan blamed worldwide intelligence lapses for a failure  to detect bin Laden, while Washington worked to establish  whether its ally had sheltered the al Qaeda leader, which  Islamabad vehemently denies.