As the news broke late Sunday night that the world's leading terrorist, Osama bin Laden, had been killed during a US raid on a compound in Pakistan, Americans took to the streets to celebrate the demise of the figurehead behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which left more than 3,000 people dead.

On Monday morning in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met reporters for an approximately six-minute long press briefing on the development. "I am glad that it was successful, the killing of bin Laden," she said.

That statement is now being heavily criticized in German political and religious circles, including among members of Merkel's own party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). And Germany's Foreign Minister, Guido Westerwelle, of Merkel's coalition party, the Free Democrats (FDP), is calling on Western nations to temper their responses to the news of Osama bin Laden's death.

"We must be careful, that we in the West -- with understanding of the relief felt -- do not send images into the world that could again lead to incitement or to the heroization of al-Qaida," he told the conservative German daily Die Welt Wednesday.