US forces finally found al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden not in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan’s border, but in a million-dollar compound in an upscale summer resort a little more than an hour’s drive from Pakistan’s capital, with his youngest wife, US officials said early yesterday.
An elite Navy Seals team conducted a helicopter raid on the compound, officials said. After 40 minutes of fighting, bin Laden and an adult son, one unidentified woman and two men — identified as the courier and his brother — were dead, officials said.
The Seals team was under orders to kill not capture bin Laden, a senior US security official said.
“This was a kill operation,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A source familiar with the operation said bin Laden was shot in the head in a firefight after he resisted the assault force.
US 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 US officials said was identified by men captured after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
“Detainees also identified this man as one of the few al-Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden. They indicated he might be living with or protected by bin Laden,” a senior US administration official said in a briefing for reporters.
Bin Laden was finally found — more than nine-and-a-half years after the attacks on the US — after authorities discovered in August last year that the courier lived with his brother and their families in an unusual and extremely high-security building, officials said.
“When we saw the compound where the brothers lived, we were shocked by what we saw: an extraordinarily unique compound,” a senior administration official said.
“The bottom line of our collection and our analysis was that we had high confidence that the compound harbored a high-value terrorist target. The experts who worked this issue for years assessed that there was a strong probability that the terrorist who was hiding there was Osama bin Laden,” another administration official said.
The home is in Abbotabad, a town about 60km north of Islamabad, that is relatively affluent and home to many retired members of Pakistan’s military.
It was a far cry from the popular notion of bin Laden hiding in some mountain cave on the rugged and inaccessible Afghan-Pakistan border — an image often evoked by officials up to and including former US president George W. Bush.
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.
Intense security measures included 3.6m to 5.5m outer walls topped with barbed wire and internal walls that sectioned off different parts of the compound, officials said. Two security gates restricted access and residents burned their trash, rather than leaving it for collection as did their neighbors, officials said.
Few windows of the three-story home faced the outside of the compound and a terrace had a 2.1m privacy wall, officials said.
“It is also noteworthy that the property is valued at approximately US$1 million, but has no telephone or Internet service connected to it,” an administration official said. “The brothers had no explainable source of wealth.”
US analysts realized that a third family lived there in addition to the two brothers and the age and makeup of the third family matched those of the relatives — including his youngest wife — they believed would be living with bin Laden.
“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 hideout to look like,” another US official said.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of