40 minutes to capture or kill: Timeline, history of Osama bin Laden raid

(States Twitter)-Reporting from Abbottabad, Pakistan— After landing by helicopter at the Pakistani compound housing Osama bin Laden early Monday, local time, the U.S. special operations team tasked with capturing or killing the Al Qaeda leader found itself in an almost continuous gun battle.

For the next 40 minutes, the team cleared the two buildings within the fortified compound in Abbottabad, north of Islamabad, trying to reach bin Laden and his family, who lived on the second and third floors of the largest structure, senior Defense and intelligence officials said Monday.

Bin Laden "resisted" and was killed by U.S. gunfire in the larger building toward the end of the operation. He fired on the assault team, a U.S. official said, and may have tried to use his wife as a shield. Other officials said disputed that Bin Laden fired a weapon. A woman also was killed, but it was not Bin Laden's wife, officials said.

This wasn't an execution," one U.S. official later said. "The assessment going into it was that it's highly unlikely that's he's going to be taken alive, but if he decided to lay down his arms, he would have been taken captive."

Bin Laden's body was taken to the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in the northern part of the Arabian Sea and buried at sea Monday at around 1 a.m. EDT.

The funeral was conducted using what a Pentagon official said were "traditional procedures for Islamic burials."

The body was washed and placed in a white sheet on a flat board as a U.S. military chaplain read remarks that were translated into Arabic. Then the board was lifted up, the official said, and the "deceased body eased into the sea." The funeral was conducted on the ship's hangar deck, which is at the waterline.

ey information that enabled the Central Intelligence Agency to eventually identify the courier came from detainees held by the U.S., according to senior intelligence officials, and crucial information came from interrogations years ago of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, officials said. Mohammed had been subjected to waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods.

"We were able to get pieces of information from detainees," the official said. "That took years, and these guys don't give it up all willingly.