The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence released 103 documents on Wednesday that were obtained by Navy SEALs when they killed bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 2, 2011. 

 

Among the newly declassified documents was a September 2010 letter to senior operative Atiyah Abd al-Rahman in which bin Laden asked for information on two Danish journalists. 

 

“Please task the necessary resources to gather information on the two journalists from Denmark working with the newspaper that insulted the Prophet and who were expelled from Pakistan, but were later returned under foreign pressure,” bin Laden wrote. 

 

See the letter here

 

The newspaper in question is Jyllands-Posten, which published 12 caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in 2005 that sparked protests across the Muslim world, some of which turned lethal. 

 

One of the two journalists in question is Simi Jan, who did not actually work for Jyllands-Posten at the time but rather as a freelance journalist for TV2 and Politiken. 

 

She told Berlingske that she was already aware of the document.

 

“I was made aware of this after bin Laden was killed, when I was told that there was this letter or correspondence. So I’ve known it for a long time,” she said. 

 

“Since the Mohammed cartoons, Denmark has been in al Qaeda’ spotlight so it doesn’t come as a surprise to me – as a Danish journalist – to be named in such a document,” Jan added. 

 

The other journalist bin Laden refers to is assumed to be former Jyllands-Posten reporter Puk Damsgård, now a Cairo-based Middle East correspondent for DR and the author of a book on Syria. 

 

Other documents released by the US revealed correspondence with family members and communications between bin Laden and al Qaeda operatives. Also included was a list of 266 English-language books, reports and US government documents. 

 

About half of the books on the reading list promote various conspiracies — including books questioning the official account that Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda carried out the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

 

The list included conspiracy theorist David Ray Griffin's ‘The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11’ and 'The Secrets of the Federal Reserve' by Eustace Mullins, known as a denier of the Holocaust.

 

The release of the materials came after Congress ordered the US spy agencies to release more of the material that was seized in the Navy SEAL raid.