A sales person stands in his shop as a TV news reports the killing of Osama bin Laden in Mumbai, India, Monday, May 2, 2011. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed thousands of people, was slain in his luxury hideout in Pakistan early Monday in a firefight with U.S. forces, ending a manhunt that spanned a frustrating decade (AP Photo via Daylife)
BBCNews on the compound where Osama bin Laden was found and killed:
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The compound is a few hundred metres from the the Pakistan Military Academy, an elite military training centre, which is Pakistan's equivalent to Britain's Sandhurst, according to the BBC's M Ilyas Khan who visited the area.
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... it lies well within Abbottabad's military cantonment - it is likely the area would have had a constant and significant military presence and checkpoints.
Pakistan's army chief is a regular visitor to the academy for graduation parades.
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The target of the operation was the compound, which had at its centre a large three-storey building.
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The compound was about 3,000 sq yards in size but people from the area told the BBC that it was surrounded by 14ft-high walls, so not much could be seen of what was happening inside.
The walls were topped by barbed wire and contained cameras.
There were two security gates at the house and no phone or internet lines running into the compound, the Associated Press (AP) reports.
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One local resident told the BBC Urdu service that the house had been built by a Pashtun man about 10 or 12 years ago and he said that none of the locals were aware of who was really living there
According to one local journalist, the house was known in the area as Waziristani Haveli - or Waziristan Mansion.
The journalist said it was owned by people from Waziristan, the mountainous and inhospitable semi-autonomous tribal area close to the Afghan border, which until now most observers believed to be the hiding place for Bin Laden.
This house was in a residential district of Abbottabad's suburbs called Bilal Town and known to be home to a number of retired military officers from the area.
Intelligence officials in the US are quoted by AP as saying that the house was custom-built to harbour a major "terrorist" figure.
It says CIA experts analysed whether it could be anyone else but they decided it was almost certainly Bin Laden.
Pakistani troops arrived at the scene after the attack and took over the area.
BBC correspondents say US troops were probably operating out of a base used by US Marines in Tarbela Ghazi, an area close to Abbottabad.
The
Atlantic Wire summarizes some details of the raid as they emerge:
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The story really begins in August, The New York Times tells us, when the U.S. military and intelligence community got its first big break in the bin Laden manhunt since American forces nearly captured bin Laden during the Battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in 2001. American intelligence officials learned that an Al Qaeda courier who was serving as bin Laden's envoy to the outside world was living in a compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, near a Pakistani military academy and not far from the capital, Islamabad,
The Times and AP explain that as C.I.A. analysts pored over satellite photos and intelligence reports over several months, they became increasingly convinced that the compound was housing bin Laden, and that it had been specifically built for that purpose. The AP explains that the three-story, million-dollar compound was surrounded by 18-foot walls with barbed wire, with two guarded security gates serving as the only entrances and a third-floor terrace featuring a seven-foot privacy wall. "No phone lines or Internet cables ran to the property, the AP notes. "The residents burned their garbage rather than put it out for collection."
The Times picks up the story from here. On March 14, as a possible government shutdown loomed, Obama held the first of five meetings with his top national security advisors to hammer out an operation to kill bin Laden. And on Friday, according to the AP, Obama tapped the Navy's elite SEAL Team Six to carry out the mission under the command of CIA Director Leon Panetta, without informing Pakistan or any other allies.
On Sunday, Reuters explains, Panetta turned a conference room at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia into a command center and watched the operation in real time. Top advisers began gathering at the White House around 1 pm EST, Aamer Madhani reports at National Journal, and Obama huddled with these officials to review last-minute plans around 2 pm.
The Times and the BBC provide some of the most thorough accounts of the raid itself, though details in all news accounts still remain murky. On Sunday afternoon in the U.S. (Monday morning in Pakistan), two or three helicopers landed in Abbottabad, with one helicopter crashing because of mechnical failure, according to the Times. The BBC explains that once the aircraft landed, men instructed panicked locals in Pashto to turn off their lights and stay in their homes. In an operation that lasted about 45 minutes, American military and intelligence operatives engaged in a firefight at the compound, fatally shooting bin Laden in the head as he tried to defend himself, and killing the al-Qaeda courier, his brother, one of bin Laden's sons, and a woman who may have been used as a human shield as well. No Americans were hurt, and Pakistani troops soon moved in and seized the area. According to several news outlets, U.S. forces loaded bin Laden's body into a helicopter, flew it to Afghanistan, and buried the body at sea.
The AP tells us that when Panetta and his team received learned bin Laden was dead, "cheers and applause" erupted in the conference room. According to National Journal, Obama learned that bin Ladin had been "tentatively identified" as dead around 3:50 pm, and received further confirmation around 7 pm after DNA and facial recognition tests had been conducted.
While the
National Journal has this to say on the operation and the teams behind it:
From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 30 miles from the center of Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classified hyperspectral imagers.
After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured. One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap -- boom, boom -- to the left side of his face. His body was aboard the choppers that made the trip back. One had experienced mechanical failure and was destroyed by U.S. forces, military and White House officials tell National Journal.
Were it not for this high-value target, it might have been a routine mission for the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.
This HVT was special, and the raids required practice, so they replicated the one-acre compound at Camp Alpha, a segregated section of Bagram Air Base. Trial runs were held in early April.
DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story -- generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That’s the code.
How did the helos elude the Pakistani air defense network? Did they spoof transponder codes? Were they painted and tricked out with Pakistan Air Force equipment? If so -- and we may never know -- two other JSOC units, the Technical Application Programs Office and the Aviation Technology Evaluation Group, were responsible. ...
JSOC costs the country more than $1 billion annually. The command has its critics, but it has escaped significant congressional scrutiny and has operated largely with impunity since 9/11. Some of its interrogators and operators were involved in torture and rendition, and the line between its intelligence-gathering activities and the CIA's has been blurred.
But Sunday’s operation provides strong evidence that the CIA and JSOC work well together. ...
... Indeed, according to accounts given to journalists by five senior administration officials Sunday night, the CIA gathered the intelligence that led to bin Laden’s location. A memo from CIA Director Leon Panetta sent Sunday night provides some hints of how the information was collected and analyzed. In it, he thanked the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for their help. NSA figured out, somehow, that there was no telephone or Internet service in the compound. How it did this without Pakistan’s knowledge is a secret. The NGIA makes the military’s maps but also develops their pattern recognition software -- no doubt used to help establish, by February of this year, that the CIA could say with “high probability” that bin Laden and his family were living there.
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Under a variety of standing orders, JSOC is involved in more than 50 current operations spanning a dozen countries, and its units, supported by so-called "white," or acknowledged, special operations entities like Rangers, Special Forces battalions, SEAL teams, and Air Force special ops units from the larger Special Operations Command, are responsible for most of the “kinetic” action in Afghanistan.
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