The killing of Osama Bin Laden

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.This week, the moment when Irish writer Roddy Doyle discovered he'd won one of the most prestigious honours in fiction: The Booker Prize. And our guest, Merritt Moseley, emeritus ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Sahar Saleem, an Egyptian paleoradiologist specialising in using medical imaging technology to study mummies and ancient artefacts.We start with the story a Jewish ...  Show more

The US tracked down the al-Qaeda leader to a city in northern Pakistan in May 2011. Special operations troops were sent to capture or kill Bin Laden in a top secret raid in the dead of night. The Americans did not tell their Pakistani allies about the raid beforehand. Gabriela Jo ...  Show more

When the Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan agreed to go and interview Osama bin Laden in 1996 he was apprehensive. By the time he reached the Al-Qaeda leader's mountain hideout - he was shaken and scared - but what was the man himself really like? Claire Bowes reports.This ...  Show more

When the Taliban were ousted from power in Afghanistan in 2001, the hunt for Osama bin Laden began in earnest. One American in particular led the search. He was CIA commander, Gary Berntsen, who had been tracking the al-Qaeda leader for years. In December 2001 he ordered a small ...  Show more

On Monday, President Biden announced that the United States had killed Ayman al-Zawahri in a drone strike in Afghanistan. 

Al-Zawahri was the leader of Al Qaeda. A long time number two to Osama bin Laden and the intellectual spine of the terrorist group, he assumed power ...