US President Barack Obama announced before midnight on May 1, Eastern Time, that US forces have hunted down the world's most wanted terrorist, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Osama Bin Laden came to the world's attention on 11 September 2001, when the attacks on the United States left more than 3,000 people dead and hundreds more injured.

Even before September 11, bin Laden was already on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.

He had been implicated in a series of deadly, high-profile attacks that had grown in their intensity and success during the 1990s.

They included a deadly firefight with U.S. soldiers in Somalia in October 1993, the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa that killed 224 in August 1998, and an attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 sailors in October 2000.

Bin Laden eluded capture for years, once reportedly slipping out of a training camp in Afghanistan just hours before a barrage of U.S. cruise missiles destroyed it.

Osama Bin Laden was born in 1957, apparently the 17th of 52 children of Mohamed Bin Laden, a multimillionaire builder responsible for 80% of Saudi Arabia's roads.

His father, Mohamed bin Laden, was a native of Yemen, who immigrated to Saudi Arabia as a child.

One of the elder bin Laden's four wives -- described as Syrian in some accounts -- was Osama's mother.

The bin Ladens were noted for their religious commitment. In his youth, Osama studied with Muslim scholars. Two of the family business' most prestigious projects also left a lasting impression: the renovations of mosques at Mecca and Medina, Islam's two holiest places.

As a young man attending college in Jeddah, Osama's interest in religion started to take a political turn.

His father's death in a helicopter crash in 1968 brought the young man a fortune running into many millions of dollars, though considerably less than the widely published estimate of USD 250 M.

While studying civil engineering at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Bin Laden came into contact with teachers and students of the more conservative brand of Islam.

Through theological debate and study, he came to embrace fundamentalist Islam as a bulwark against what he saw as the decadence of the West.

During the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 Osama bin Laden took up the anti-communist cause with a will, moving to Afghanistan where, for a decade, he fought an ultimately victorious campaign with the mujahideen.

Intelligence experts believe that the US Central Intelligence Agency played an active role in arming and training the mujahideen, including Bin Laden.

In the late 1980s, bin Laden founded al Qaeda, Arabic for "the base". One of its purposes was to provide documentation for Arab fighters who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, including death certificates.

Al Qaeda, under bin Laden's leadership, ran a number of guesthouses for these Arab fighters and their families. It also operated training camps to help them prepare for the fight against the Soviets.

His hatred of Moscow is said to have shifted to Washington after 300,000 US troops, women among them, were based in Saudi Arabia, home of two of Islam's holiest places, during the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Bin Laden vowed to avenge what he saw as blasphemy.

Along with many of his mujahideen comrades, he brought his mix of fighting skills and Islamic zeal to many anti-US factions within the Middle East.

American pressure ended brief sojourns in Saudi Arabia - which removed his citizenship in 1994 - and then Sudan, and Bin Laden moved back to Afghanistan in January 1996.

The country, in a state of anarchy, was home to a diverse range of Islamic groups, including the fundamentalist Taleban militia, which captured the capital Kabul nine months later.

Though geographically limited, Bin Laden's wealth, increasing all the time through lucrative worldwide investments, enabled him to finance and control a continuously shifting series of transnational militant alliances through his Al Qaeda network.

In Afghanistan in 1996, bin Laden issued a "fatwa," or a religious order, entitled "Declaration of War Against Americans Who Occupy the Lands of the Two Holy Mosques."

In his first interview with Western media in 1997, bin Laden told CNN that the United States was "unjust, criminal and tyrannical."

In a 1997 CNN interview, bin Laden declared a "jihad," or "holy war," against the United States.

In February 1998, he issued a second fatwa - or religious edict - on behalf of the World Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, stating that killing Americans and their allies was a Muslim duty.

Six months later, two bombs rocked the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Some 224 people died and nearly 5,000 were wounded. He was indicted as chief suspect, along with 16 of his colleagues. He appeared on the FBI's "most wanted" list, with a reward of up to USD 25 M on his head.

As well as the African bombings, Bin Laden was implicated in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, a 1995 car bomb in the Saudi capital Riyadh and a truck bomb in a Saudi barracks, which killed 19 US soldiers.

Then came the events of 11 September 2001. Two hijacked aircraft smashed into, and destroyed, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

Another aircraft ploughed into the Pentagon in Washington and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Altogether more than 3,000 people died in the attacks, which led to the US-led operation against the Taliban.

Al Qaeda soon became America's prime target in Bush's war against global terrorism. Bin Laden, its founder, became the most-wanted man in the world.

Allied forces moved into Afghanistan late in 2001. At the time, it was believed that Bin Laden might have been killed during the battle for the Tora Bora cave complex. In reality, he had slipped across the border into Pakistan.

In February 2003, an audio tape, purporting to be of Bin Laden, was delivered to the al-Jazeera television company.

The last known sighting of Bin Laden by anyone other than his very close entourage remains in late 2001 as he prepared to flee from his Tora Bora stronghold.

He was widely assumed to have traveled east, across into Pakistan to be given hospitality and shelter by certain local Pashtun tribesmen loyal to the Taleban and opposed to their own government led by President Pervez Musharraf.

Osama bin Laden's appearances have been carefully timed and aimed, analysts say, at influencing Western public opinion by driving a wedge between citizens and their leaders.

One such video was issued in 2004 - the same year as the Madrid bombings - and days before the US election.

A second surfaced as the sixth anniversary of the 11 September attacks approached, timed to quell rumours that he had been dead for some time.

In statements released from his hideouts in Afghanistan after September 11, bin Laden denied al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks.

*Information compiled from the BBC, CNN, and other global media

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