Which goes completely with the Pak newspaper story I saw. The Z-man could have been mourning just about anything, or just pretending to be mourning something with the expectation that doing so better cemented his position of leadership. Who knows.
"Some Paki paper says so" doesn't merit a whole lot of consideration from me.
FReegards!
Regardless of all that, we have good data that he was alive after 2001, and that indeed the last good datapoint was in 2004. We have most if not all of the material, both the published stuff and the not-so-published stuff.