Cuban president criticises US for shooting unarmed al-Qaida leader in front of his family and predicts a backlash

Fidel Castro has accused the US of executing Osama bin Laden, violating Pakistani law and desecrating Muslim burial tradition in an "abhorrent" operation.

Killing the unarmed al-Qaida leader in front of his family and burying the body at sea would multiply "hatred and revenge" against the US rather than make it safer, said Cuba's former president.

"Whatever the actions attributed to him, the assassination of an unarmed human being while surrounded by his own relatives is something abhorrent," Castro wrote in a column published on Thursday in the communist party newspaper Granma.

"Obama has no way to conceal that Osama was executed in front of his children and wives, who are now under the custody of the authorities of Pakistan … whose laws have been violated, its national dignity offended and its religious traditions desecrated."

Castro's comments put him in company with Hamas and other Islamic groups that have criticised the killing. There is growing international unease over the way the White House's original version of a firefight during the navy Seal raid in Abbottabad last Sunday has changed.

Assassinating Bin Laden and plunging his corpse into the ocean showed "fear and insecurity" that would turn him into a "far more dangerous person" via an anti-US backlash, Castro said. He predicted that after initial euphoria even the US public would end up criticising the operation.

The 84-year-old leader stressed that Cuba expressed solidarity with the US after the 11 September attacks but that Washington then pursued "unjust wars" in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing countless innocents, and tortured suspects at Guantánamo Bay.

His criticism followed a statement from Venezuela's government that the US was fighting "terror with terror" and had used Bin Laden as a pretext to occupy central Asia. It demanded a US withdrawal from the region.

Venezuela's vice-president, Elías Jaua, said the US was using assassination as an instrument to resolve problems. "I never cease to be surprised by how crime and murder has been naturalised and how it's celebrated," he said.