Other stories of Osama Killing

Mangalore Today / PTI

How a courier led US to Osama mansion

Islamabad: After years of dead ends and promising leads gone cold, the big break came last August.

 

A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden’s whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a sprawling mansion 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American counterterrorism operations. The compound was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier.

What followed was eight months of painstaking intelligence work, culminating in a helicopter assault by American military and intelligence operatives that ended in the death of Osama bin Laden, and concluded one of history’s most extensive and frustrating manhunts.

American officials said that Osama bin Laden was shot in the head after he tried to resist the assault force, and that one of his sons died along with him.

For nearly a decade, American military and intelligence forces have chased the specter of Osama bin Laden throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan, once coming agonizingly close and losing him in a pitched battle at Tora Bora, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. As Obama administration officials describe it, the real breakthrough came when they finally figured out the name and location of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted courier, whom the Qaeda chief appeared to rely on to maintain contacts with the outside world.

Detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators, and said the manwas a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

American intelligence officials said Sunday night that they finally learned the courier’s real name four years ago, but that it took another two years for them to learn the general region where he operated.

 

Still, it was not until August when they tracked him to the compound in Abbottabad, a medium sized city about an hour’s drive north of Islamabad, the capital.

C.I.A. analysts spent the next several weeks examining satellite photos and intelligence reports to determine who might be living at the mansion, and a senior administration official said that by September the C.I.A. had determined there was a "strong possibility" that Osama bin Laden himself was hiding there.

It was hardly the spartan cave in the mountains where many had envisioned Osama bin Laden hiding. Rather, it was a large mansion on the outskirts of the town center, set on an imposing hilltop and ringed by 12-foot-high concrete walls topped with barbed wire.

The property was valued at $1 million, but it had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection.

American officials believed that the mansion, built in 2005, was designed for the specific purpose of hiding Osama bin Laden.

Months more of intelligence work would follow before American spies felt highly confident that it was indeed Osama bin Laden and his family who were hiding in the compound -- and before President Obama believed the intelligence was solid enough to begin planning a mission to go after the Al Qaeda leader.

On March 14, Mr. Obama held the first of what would be five national security meetings in the course of the next six weeks to go over plans for the operation.

The meetings, attended by only the president’s closest national security aides, took place as other White House aides scrambled to avert a possible government shutdown over the budget.

Four more similar meetings to discuss the plan would follow, until President Obama gathered his aides one final time last Friday.



Osama was just 800 yards from the Pakistan Military Academy


Islamabad:  Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was hiding in a massive compound, worth a million US dollars, located just 800 yards from the Pakistan Military Academy near Abbottabad city, in the country’s northwest when he was killed in a pre-dawn raid by US special forces today.

 

Local residents said the compound was bought by a man they knew as Arshad Khan, believed to a resident of Charsadda in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa tribal region.

A two-storey building was constructed in the compound in 2005 and those living inside did not mingle with local residents of the area near Abbottabad, 120 km from Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.

Pakistani troops sealed off the compound and blocked all roads leading to it hours after the operation that resulted in the death of bin Laden, one of his sons, two suspected couriers and a woman who was being used as a human shield.

 

Two women and four children, described as bin Laden’s wives and offspring, were taken away from the compound.

Footage on television showed a compound with white walls about 12 feet high located amidst agricultural fields surrounded by Pakistani troops.

Earlier footage aired on TV channels showed flames leaping out of the compound from a helicopter that was destroyed in the raid carried out at about 1.15 am.

Local residents said three helicopters had participated in what Pakistan’s Foreign Office described as an "intelligence driven operation" by US forces.

 

They said they had heard several explosions and heavy gunfire.

The people inside the compound fired at the helicopters with automatic weapons and rocket launchers, reports said.

Powerful army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani had contended during an address at a passing out parade at the Pakistan Military Academy on April 23 that the "terrorist backbone had been broken".

Bin Laden’s killing at a compound near a city that is home to the military academy, a brigade and thousands of army personnel could prove to be an embarrassment to the Pakistani military, observers said.

It could not immediately be ascertained how long bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, had been in Abbottabad, which is a two-hour drive from Islamabad.

In January, Indonesian Al Qaeda operative Umar Patek was captured by Pakistani intelligence operatives in Abbottabad.

US intelligence became suspicious about the compound in Abbottabad in August last year.

It was eight times larger than other homes in the area and access to the compound was severely restricted, with elaborate security and 12 to 18-foot walls topped with barbed wire, ABC News reported.

The compound had no phone service or televisions and the main building had few windows and a seven foot wall for privacy.

Abbottabad, a historic city named after Major James Abbott, a British military officer who founded it in 1853, is a key city on the Karakoram Highway that connects Pakistan and China. It has been a major garrison since the British era.


The military operation that killed Osama


    Heliborne operation which involved US Navy Seals (a highly trained commando operation)
    Choppers flew in from US bases in Afghanistan
    Special forces came down by ropes into the mansion
    One of the helicopters developed mechanical problems and crash landed
    This helicopter was destroyed by US Forces
    The operation lasted 40 minutes
    Osama bin Laden personally fought back along with others
    He was shot in the head and his remains were taken into US custody
    Three other men and a woman were killed in the raid
    The woman was being used as a human shield 
    Osama was allegedly living here with his youngest wife
    No American casualties
    All American forces return to their base in the other helicopters

 

Osama bin Laden was holed up in a two-storey house 100 yards from a Pakistani military academy when four helicopters carrying U.S. forces swooped early Monday, killing the world’s most wanted man and leaving his final hiding place in flames, Pakistani officials and a witness said.

They said Osama bin Laden’s guards opened fire from the roof of the compound in the small northwestern town of Abbottabad, and one of the choppers crashed. However U.S. officials said no Americans were hurt in the operation. The sound of at least two explosions rocked Abbottabad as the fighting raged.

Abbottabad is home to three Pakistan army regiments and thousands of military personnel and is dotted with military buildings. The discovery that Osama bin Laden was living in an army town in Pakistan raises pointed questions about how he managed to evade capture and even whether Pakistan’s military and intelligence leadership knew of his whereabouts and sheltered him.

Critics have long accused elements of Pakistan’s security establishment of protecting Osama bin Laden, though Islamabad has always denied this. Army and government officials gave no formal comment Monday.

Most intelligence assessments believed bin Laden was holed up somewhere along the lawless border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan, possibly in a cave and sheltered by loyal tribesmen. That region is remote, homes to soaring mountains and the Pakistan state has little or no presence in much of it.

It was not known how long Osama bin Laden had been in Abbottabad, which is surrounded by hills and is less than half a days drive from the border region with Afghanistan and two hours from the capital, Islamabad.

It was also unclear how much of a role -- if any -- Pakistani security forces played in the operation. A Pakistani official said the choppers took off from Ghazi air base in northwest Pakistan, where the U.S. army was based to help out in the aftermath of the floods in 2010.

Pakistani officials said a son of Osama bin Laden and three other people were killed.

Other unidentified men were taken by helicopter away from the scene, while four children and two women left in an ambulance, the official said.

Abbottabad resident Mohammad Haroon Rasheed said the raid happened about 1:15 a.m. local time.

"I heard a thundering sound, followed by heavy firing. Then firing suddenly stopped. Then more thundering, then a big blast," he said. "In the morning when we went out to see what happened, some helicopter wreckage was lying in an open field."

He said the house was 100 meters (yards) away from the gate of the Kakul Military Academy, an army run institution where top officers train. A Pakistan intelligence official said the property where Osama bin Laden was staying was 3,000 square feet.

A Pakistani official in the town said fighters on the roof opened fire on the choppers as they came close to the building with rocket propelled grenades. Another official said four helicopters took off from the Ghazi air base in northwest Pakistan.

Last summer, the U.S. army was based in Ghazi to help out in the aftermath of the floods.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

Pakistan has in the past cooperated with the CIA in arresting Al-Qaeda suspects on its soil, but relations between its main intelligence agency and the CIA had been very strained in recent months amid tensions over the future of Afghanistan.

In late January, a senior Indonesian Al-Qaeda operative, Umar Patek, was arrested at another location in Abbottabad.

News of his arrest only broke in late March. A Pakistani intelligence official said its officers were led to the house where Patek was staying after they arrested an Al-Qaeda facilitator, Faisal Shahzad, who worked at the post office there.