MADRID / BERLIN, May 4: European happiness with the death of Osama bin Laden was tempered on Wednesday by details showing he was unarmed when shot dead and concerns about whether torture of prisoners helped US forces track him down.

In Germany and Spain, legislators questioned Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero over their enthusiastic praise of US President Barack Obama.

“It’s likely that Bin Laden sought his own destiny,” Zapatero told parliament on Wednesday after Gaspar Llamazares, deputy from the small leftist party Izquierda Unida, questioned his congratulating Obama.

Zapatero said “any democrat” would have preferred Bin Laden stood trial, but that he understood how the operation ended in the way it did for “one of history’s bloodiest criminals”.

In Germany a senior member of parliament from Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, Siegfried Kauder, criticised her statement which said she was “glad that killing Bin Laden was successful”.

“I wouldn’t have used those words. That is a vengeful way of thinking that one shouldn’t have. That’s mediaeval,” he said. “A random killing is not permitted according to international agreements. If one concludes that Bin Laden was no longer active, the killing could be seen as random.”

Television and radio hosts zeroed in on revision of certain details of the operation, such as the fact that Bin Laden was not armed and that the woman killed had not been used as a shield, saying his death looked more like an execution.—Reuters