HAVANA: Cuba's Fidel Castro criticised US President Barack Obama on Friday for assuming the role of judge and executioner in the slaying of Osama Bin Laden, a year after the al Qaeda leader's demise.

Writing in the official Communist Party newspaper Granma, Castro said Obama was competing with Republican challenger Mitt Romney to justify the raid that killed bin Laden in Pakistan, a US ally.

“But does the president of the United States have the right to judge and the right to kill; to become the court and at the same time the executioner and to carry out such crimes in a country and against a people on the other side of the planet?” he wrote.

He also criticised Obama for his brief trip to Afghanistan on the May 2 anniversary of Bin Laden's death.

He said the US president was acting “as if the world is not aware of the massive murders, the burning of books holy to Muslims and the outrages with the bodies of murdered people.”

Castro, 85, stepped down from the Cuban presidency in 2006 after being sidelined by illness, but he remains active with visits by foreign dignitaries and a weekly column in the state-controlled Cuban press.