How the U.S. Found and Killed Osama bin Laden

WASHINGTON – U.S. forces finally found al Qaeda leader Osama bin laden not in a mountain cave on Afghanistan's border, but with his youngest wife in a million-dollar compound in a summer resort just over an hour's drive from Pakistan's capital, U.S. officials said.

The elite troops , wearing night-vision goggles, came under almost immediate fire as they entered Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, a town 35 miles north of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, U.S. officials said Monday.

U.S. forces were led to the fortress-like three-story building after more than four years tracking one of bin Laden's most trusted couriers, whom U.S. officials said was identified by men captured after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The SEALs battled their way through the first floor. They made it to the upper floors, where they found the man who had eluded American forces for so long. The troops had orders to take bin Laden alive only if he posed no threat to American soldiers. But bin Laden refused to give himself up. That’s when he was shot in a bedroom — only minutes into the raid — ending a 10-year manhunt.

Bin Laden was finally found -- more than 9-1/2 years after the 2001 attacks on the United States -- after authorities discovered in August 2010 that the courier lived with his brother and their families in an unusual and extremely high-security building, officials said.

They said the courier and his brother were among those killed in the raid.

President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and members of the national security team watched a live feed of the raid in the White House Situation Room, officials said.

“The world is safer. It is a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden,” Obama said 12 hours after announcing the terrorist’s death.

The building, about eight times the size of other nearby houses, sat on a large plot of land that was relatively secluded when it was built in 2005. When it was constructed, it was on the outskirts of Abbottabad's center, at the end of a dirt road, but some other homes have been built nearby in the six years since it went up, officials said.

The town where bin Laden was living is Abbottabad, and his home was within walking distance of the Pakistan Military Academy, the West Point for the Pakistani Army. The town is also home to many current and retired Pakistani army officials, and analysts on Monday were questioning how such a well-appointed, secure facility as bin Laden’s home could be built in such a populated, militarized area without anyone in the Pakistani Army becoming aware of it.

Everything we saw, the extremely elaborate operational security, the brothers' background and their behavior and the location of the compound itself was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden's hide-out to look like," another Obama administration official said.

Abbottabad is a popular summer resort, located in a valley surrounded by green hills near Pakistani Kashmir. Islamist militants, particularly those fighting in Indian-controlled Kashmir, used to have training camps near the town.