The US operation to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden was
months in the planning but took just minutes to complete.
In a daring raid 120 miles (192km) inside Pakistan, a team of US special
forces flew from Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hiding place in the dead of night.
They swooped down on the compound in stealth helicopters, swept through the
buildings within the high walled enclosure and shot dead a total of five people
including Bin Laden.
Around 40 minutes later they left, taking with them Bin Laden's body and a
hoard of computer data devices and other information containing intelligence
about al-Qaeda and Bin Laden's activities.
They left behind the other dead, among whom were a woman and one of Bin
Laden's sons. They also left a group of three women and 13 children - two girls
and 11 boys - bound with plastic ties.
The US team was forced to abandon
one of its helicopters after it was damaged in a hard landing at the compound
site. It was mostly destroyed in an explosion set by the US forces as they
departed.
Publicly, the US authorities have
given few details about the raid and some of these have changed since the news
of Bin Laden's death was officially announced.
'Something
nasty'
What follows has been pieced
together from official US statements and off-the-record interviews, other news
sources and BBC interviews with those living near the compound in Abbottabad,
the quiet, leafy garrison town 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
Just a handful of US military and
senior officials around President Obama knew of the planned raid. However,
within seconds of the arrival of the US helicopters overhead in Abbottabad on
Monday, their presence was being advertised on Twitter.
"Helicopter hovering above
Abbotttabad at 1am (is a rare event)," tweeted Sohaib Athar, an IT
engineer who lives about 3km (two miles) from the compound.
Eleven minutes later Athar reported:
"A huge window-shaking bang here in Abbottabad. I hope it's not the start
of something nasty."
On the other side of the world
President Obama and his closest advisers had gathered in the White House
situation room to monitor progress of the assault. A few miles away, at CIA
headquarters, the spy agency's director Leon Panetta sat in a windowless
seventh floor room, which had been turned into a command centre.
From there he fed the president and
his team details of the raid as it unfolded. The operation now under way was
the culmination of weeks of detailed surveillance and planning involving some
of the United States' most sophisticated technology.
Planning for the raid started late
last year. US officials have spoken of how an intercept in late August 2010 of
a phone call to a trusted courier of Bin Laden in Pakistan was a breakthrough
that led to the raid.
The call was made to Abu Ahmed
al-Kuwaiti, a man the US had been seeking for years as part of the decade
long hunt for Bin Laden.
Controversially, they had learnt of his identity from interrogations of
detainees in Guantanamo. Armed with the mobile phone number, the US was able to
track him to the compound in Abbottabad.
The
pacer
It was unusual. High walls prevented
anyone from seeing in and privacy screens on the main building's balconies
blocked all sight lines. It had no phone or internet connection and all rubbish
was burnt inside the high walls rather
than being collected as usual.
Access to the site was through a tall green metal security gate which led
into a passageway with high walls either side, and another security gate
leading to an inner compound at the other end.
According to
neighbours
who spoke to the BBC, the occupants rarely went out and when they did so -
in either a red Suzuki jeep or van - they passed through security doors that
closed immediately afterwards.
US intelligence soon began an intensive period of surveillance. While
satellites watched from the sky a CIA safe house was set up nearby.
From the safe house, agents were able to observe the comings and goings from
the compound in order to establish a "pattern of life" at the
building. Some details of how they tried to obtain key information about the
building have emerged.
Locals told the BBC that in the
weeks leading up to the raid, people in "simple, plain clothes"
knocked on doors in the neighbourhood posing as prospective property buyers.
They would admire the homes and ask for any architectural plans, saying that
they wanted to build something similar.
One of the men even went to Bin
Laden's compound to make inquiries, they said.
The CIA also employed a
sophisticated stealth drone that could float high about the compound without
detection by the Pakistani authorities.
With its distinctive bat-winged
shape, the RQ170
Sentinel is capable of flying undetected at
high altitude taking photographs and sending real-time video. The aircraft can
also capture images shot at an angle. This has the advantage of not having to
fly directly over its target.
Despite the presence on the ground
and observation from the sky, the CIA was still unable to positively identify
Bin Laden as the man often spotted often walking up and down outside the house.
Agents dubbed him "the pacer".
He and his associates went to
extraordinary efforts to remain undetected. According to a detailed account of
the lead-up to the raid in the Washington Post, US officials were "stunned
to realise that whenever Kuwaiti or others left to make a call, they drove for
90 minutes before placing" a battery in a mobile phone.
In the meantime, a team from the
secretive US
Navy Seal Team 6 unit, had been practising storming a
mock up of the compound, constructed at US bases on both coasts.
The
raid
In the end, after months of
investigation, the US had no conclusive proof of Bin Laden's presence in the
compound. As President Obama told CBS television news, "this was still a
55/45 situation."
Nevertheless, 2 May presented a
moonless night on which to mount the raid. The president formally gave the
go-ahead on the morning of Friday 29 April.
But despite the detailed planning,
the operation began to go wrong almost as soon as the raiders appeared
overhead.
Five aircraft flew two teams of Navy
Seals from a US base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, into Pakistan. Three large
Chinook helicopters carrying a back-up team of 24 Seals put down near the Indus
River, a 10-minute flight from the compound.
The two other aircraft, specially
adapted Black Hawk helicopters,
flew on to Abbottabad. On board, were 23 Seals, a translator and a tracking dog
called Cairo. Three of the Seals were specifically tasked to seek out Bin
Laden.
In the original plan, one of the
helicopters was to hover over the main building allowing the Seals to clamber
down ropes onto the roof. The other was to drop its team within the grounds of
the compound. This should have taken just a couple of minutes allowing the
aircraft to fly away, thereby attracting less attention.
However, on arrival, the Black Hawk
hovering over Bin Laden's building skittered around in the heat-thinned air
forcing the pilot to ditch the craft into the ground. It made a hard landing
inside the compound but its tail and rotor caught on one of the high walls.
The other aircraft immediately
landed outside the walls. Both teams clambered out unhurt but they had now lost
the element of surprise and had to start blasting their way into the compound.
Behind the perimeter walls were
further inner walls cordoning off the three-storey main building where Bin
Laden and his family lived and a smaller single-storey guard house.
Leon Panetta, the CIA chief, has
said the commandos blasted their way through "three or four" walls to
get into the buildings. As the raid got under way, Panetta said, he and those
in the White House situation room were in the dark for "around 20-25
minutes" as to what was actually going on in the compound.
According to US officials, as the
members of the US team moved to search the buildings they were fired on by one
of the two brothers who were close confidantes of Bin Laden. Al-Kuwaiti is said
to have fired from behind a door of the guard house. The Navy Seals killed him
and his wife, who reportedly made a lunge for the soldiers.
Moving into the main building the
commandos come across al-Kuwaiti's brother on the ground floor. Believing that
he was about to shoot, they shot him dead. On the way up the stairs, Bin
Laden's adult son, Khalid Bin Laden,
met the Navy Seal team. He too was shot and killed.
'We
got him'
On the top floor the trio of Seals looking
for Bin Laden found him, some 20 minutes into the raid, standing at the end of
the corridor. They recognised him immediately. He also saw them and ducked back
inside a room.
Initial US accounts of the mission
said that before he was killed he had exchanged fire with the commandos while
using his wife as a human shield. US officials have now told the Associated
Press news agency that after the Seals rushed into the room, they found two
women in front of Bin Laden, screaming and trying to protect him.
One of the soldiers pushed the women
aside, the Seal behind him fired at Bin Laden, hitting him in the head and
chest killing him instantly.
According to this account, Bin Laden
was killed as soon as he stuck his head out of his bedroom. He was still alive
although badly injured when the Seal team entered the room where they shot him
again killing him.
After the shooting, one of the
soldiers radioed his commanders: "Geronimo EKIA". In the cold
military jargon, "EKIA" (Enemy killed in action) signalled that the
team had killed their target.
The message was relayed to the White
House where President Obama is said to have received the news with a terse
"We
got him". Those in the situation room
did not see the moment of Bin Laden's death.
Geronimo, it has been suggested was
the code name for Bin Laden, but US officials have indicated that this referred
to the stage in the operation in which Bin Laden was either captured or killed.
As they began photographing his
body, an AK-47 and a Russian-made Makarov pistol were discovered in the room,
but Bin Laden had not touched them.
Earlier reports suggested that Bin Laden's wife, believed to be 29-year-old
Amal al-Ahmed Sadah, was in the room with him and was shot in the leg when she
lunged at the soldiers. Pakistani police say that
the couple's
12-year-old daughter was also in the room and witnessed Bin Laden's death.
As the minutes ticked by, a suspicious Pakistani air force began scrambling
some of its fighter jets, heightening fears in Washington that the US commandos
could still be in danger as they tried to return to Afghanistan.
Pakistan was not tipped off in advance about the raid although a Pakistani
intelligence official told the BBC that once US helicopters entered Pakistan
air space the US officials told their counterparts that an operation was under
way against "a high value target". They were not told the target was
Bin Laden. This ultimately led to the jets being called back.
With Bin Laden dead, the US team prepared to leave.
They trawled through the rest of the compound collecting a "
treasure trove"
of documents, computer hard drives, memory sticks and other material that
could provide useful intelligence.
One of the Chinooks flew in to collect the team from the broken helicopter.
They loaded up Bin Laden's body, corralled those still alive into a room, piled
explosives into the damaged aircraft and blew it up. They then left for the US
air base in Bagram, Afghanistan.
One neighbour in Abbottabad told the BBC how one of the departing
helicopters swept past his house, "flying very low, coming very
close".
"I threw myself to the ground thinking it was going to collide with my
house," Zahoor Abbasi said.
From there Bin Laden's body was flown to the USS Carl Vinson, a US aircraft
carrier in the north Arabian sea, where Bin Laden was prepared for burial. A
White House spokesman said the corpse was prepared for burial "in
conformance with Islamic precepts and practice", then placed in a weighted
bag and dropped into the water from the vessel's deck.
Officials said this was to prevent his grave from becoming a shrine.
Source:
Adrian Brown
