Bin Laden corpse photo gruesome: US

The White House has warned that a photograph of Osama Bin Laden's corpse was "gruesome" and said it was concerned it could be inflammatory if it was publicly released.

"It is fair to say it is a gruesome photograph ... it could be inflammatory," White House spokesman Jay Carney said today.

"We are reviewing the situation. We are going about this in a methodical way and trying to make the best call."

Carney added that senior administration officials were discussing whether it would be advisable to release the photograph of bin Laden after he was shot in the head by a US special forces soldier in a daring raid in Pakistan on Sunday.

But officials will also be conscious of the potential of stirring a backlash, possibly against US missions abroad, or other targets, in the Muslim world from any picture deemed disrespectful to the dead or disfigured.

Another official said bin Laden was shot above the eye in the raid on a Pakistani compound on Sunday, raising the prospect that any photo released to the public might show gruesome evidence of his death.

One option may be for the White House to release a picture of the Al-Qaeda terror mastermind at the time of his burial at sea on the USS Vinson on the Indian Ocean.

Officials said that bin Laden's body was washed and he was accorded full Islamic rites before being slipped into the Arabian Sea.

US government figures said that the burial at sea was motivated partly out of a desire to avoid any land-based grave site becoming a shrine to a man some supporters now consider a martyr.

A senior official said Monday that bin Laden was identified during a firefight in the compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.

After he was shot, US intelligence professionals used sophisticated photo recognition techniques to identify bin Laden with 95 percent certainty.

A later DNA test proved to 99.9 percent level of certainty that the man found in the compound was indeed the Al-Qaeda kingpin, who is reviled in the United States, officials said.

Soldiers on the ground in the operation also said that bin Laden was identified by other people who were in the compound at the time of the daring airborne attack.

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