Islam is opposed to burials at sea, a spokesman for Al-Azhar, the top Sunni Muslim authority, said today after US officials said Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been given a watery grave.

"If it is true that the body was thrown into the sea, then Islam is totally against that," Mahmud Azab, an adviser to the grand imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, told AFP.

"Any corpse, if it belongs to someone murdered or someone who died of natural causes, must be respected. The bodies of believers and non-believers, Muslim or Christian, must be respected," he added.

The Cairo-based Al-Azhar is the most prestigious centre of religious learning in the Sunni Muslim world.

US officials said on Monday that bin Laden was buried at sea after being shot dead in a US helicopter-borne raid on his fortified villa in Pakistan to avoid a "shrine" situation.

"We wanted to avoid a situation where it would become a shrine," one official told AFP, adding that there was no time for negotiations with other countries to arrange for a possible burial.

Earlier, an administration official said of the corpse: "We are ensuring that it is handled in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition.

"This is something that we take very seriously. And so therefore this is being handled in an appropriate manner."