WASHINGTON D.C. — President Barack Obama announced late Sunday night that Osama bin Laden has been killed.

The Al-Qaida mastermind is dead and the United States has his body, the Associated Press reported.

Obama is made the announcement from the White House.

Bin Laden was killed in a firefight in Pakistan, Obama said.

Obama described Bin Laden as a killer of thousands and a “mass murderer of Muslims.”

(AP) —A small team of Americans carried out the attack and took custody of bin Laden’s remains, the president said in the dramatic late-night statement.

The development comes just months before the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Centers and Pentagon, orchestrated by bin Laden’s al-Qaida organization, that killed more than 3,000 people.

The attacks set off a chain of events that led the United States into wars in Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and America’s entire intelligence apparatus was overhauled to counter the threat of more terror attacks at home.

Al-Qaida organization was also blamed for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 231 people and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 American sailors in Yemen, as well as countless other plots, some successful and some foiled.

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