I’m with you on Bin Laden. Nothing but audio tapes “believed to be him” for all these years.
The OBL thing doesn’t smell right at all. The timing was too perfect.
There is a very sharp analysis of a statement given by Zawahri in august 2005, for Lowell Jacoby - concluding that OBL had been killed. Roughly six months later a local rag in Pakistan confirmed that OBL had died of wounds after a firefight. The article didn’t stay up very long, though.