Posted by Ram Kumar Shrestha on May 2, 2011
Rate This
By BRIAN ROSS (@brianross) , MATTHEW COLE and AVNI PATEL
It began with a tip to the CIA eight months ago about a possible Bin Laden hiding place, and led Sunday to the bold military operation that will go down in U.S. history.
Osama Bin Laden wasn’t hiding in a cave, but in a Pakistani city of 90,000 called Abbottabad, just north of the Pakistani capital.
Tracking one of the Al Qaeda leader’s trusted couriers, the CIA discovered an acre-large, million-dollar compound with 12 to 18-foot walls that had no telephones but was eight times the size of other homes in the area and just off a major highway.
President Obama gave the order for a small team of U.S. Navy SEALs in Afghanistan to go in Sunday night Pakistan time, even though bin Laden had never once actually been seen in the compound.
“I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action,” said President Obama in a nationally televised address Sunday night, “and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.”
Bin Laden, who had been pictured over the years firing an automatic weapon, and his son and three others opened fire on the U.S. raiders.
Said President Obama, “After a firefight, they killed Osama Bin Laden and took custody of his body.”
None of the Americans was injured in the raid.
The U.S. team was on the ground for only 40 minutes, most of the time spent scrubbing the compound for information about al Qaeda and its future plans.
After the raid, blood covered the floor of one room inside the sprawling house on the right. In another room to the left that held a small kitchenette, broken computers could be seen, minus their hard drives
Remarkably, Bin Laden was hiding almost under the nose of the Pakistani military, which has a major garrison in Abbottabad and the Pakistani version of West Point.
U.S. officials say Pakistan was not informed in advance of the military operation inside their borders.
Finding Osama Bin Laden
Bin Laden had long been said to be in the mountainous region along the Afghanistan, Pakistan border, hiding in a cave as the U.S. sought to kill him with drone strikes from above. Instead, he was in a house with many peculiar features that brought it to the attention of U.S. authorities.
After tracking a courier to the structure, the CIA noted that the house had high exterior walls topped with barbed wire, high windows and few points of access. Residents burned their trash instead of putting it out. Built in 2005, the compound also had a seven-foot-high wall on a third-floor terrace. U.S. officials wondered if the extra wall was meant to allow a tall man — Bin Laden’s height was estimated at between 6’4″ and 6’6″ — to go outside without being seen.
The CIA began to believe that a high-value target was in the house. A CIA “red team” assigned to assess the house decided that it could well be sheltering Bin Laden, even though he’d never been seen in the compound.
The CIA was responsible for “finding” and “fixing” the target, said a U.S. official, and the military “finished” the job. According to U.S. officials, the Navy SEALS who would take part in the raid practiced the assault in a replica of the compound.
Late Sunday night local time, two U.S. helicopters flew in low from Afghanistan and swept into the compound. As CIA director Leon Panetta listened in, Navy SEALs under the command of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) stormed the compound and engaged Bin Laden and his men in a firefight, killing Bin Laden and all those with him.
Two Bin Laden couriers were killed, as was one of Osama Bin Laden’s sons and a woman reportedly used as a shield by one of the men. Other women and children were present in the compound, according to Pakistani officials, but were not harmed. U.S. officials said that Bin Laden himself fired his weapon during the fight, and that he was asked to surrender but did not. He was shot in the head and then shot again to make sure he was dead.
One of the U.S. helicopters, a CH47 Chinook, was damaged but not destroyed during the operation, and U.S. forces elected to destroy it themselves with explosives.
The Americans took Bin Laden’s body into custody after the firefight, taking it back to Afghanistan by helicopter, and confirmed his identity. His DNA matched DNA taken from a sister who had died of brain cancer in Boston. Her brain had been preserved in case it was needed to confirm Bin Laden’s DNA. A U.S. official said Bin Laden was later buried at sea in accordance with Islamic practice.
According to Pakistani officials, the operation was a joint U.S.-Pakistani operation, but U.S. officials said only U.S. personnel were involved in the raid.
Abbottabad is a city of 90,000 in the Orash Valley, north of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, and east of Peshawar. It is 90 miles by road from Islamabad and 40 miles by air.
@abcnews
- Share this:
No comments:
Post a Comment