On May 1, 2011, at approximately 11:30 PM, the then US President Barack Obama announced the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden was killed in a house in the city of Abbottabad, Pakistan, after a long period of intelligence gathering and analysis.
The house where the Al-Qaeda leader was killed had unusual security: high walls and security wires, tinted windows, and no internet or telephone services. All waste found in the house was burned. The size and structure of the house surprised US authorities. The house was surrounded by a wall four to six meters high, and the house appeared to be eight times larger than the surrounding houses, but it had no telephone and no internet.
Another thing noticed was that the residents of the house had no job or means of income that would allow them to own such a large house. This was one of the things that further drew the authorities' attention to the house. But another thing was that Osama never left the house, so the Americans had to devise a strategy to identify who was inside.
While they were investigating and watching the house, they noticed a man walking in the house's garden, whom they suspected was Osama bin Laden. They then measured the length of his shadow. The officials called a journalist named John Miller, who had previously interviewed Osama in the 1990s, and asked him to provide them with videos he had taken of Osama walking, to compare with the footage they had of the man moving around in the house. They noticed a great resemblance. Not just the shadow, but even Osama's slight limp matched what was seen in the video.
Another thing that caused suspicion was the large amount of laundry hung on the roof of the house, which indicated that many people were living there. Then, on Sunday, elite US forces from the Navy Seal Team Six launched a raid on the house in Abbottabad, about 100 kilometers from the city of Islamabad.
President Obama said, "No Americans were harmed during the raid." A US official who provided more details about the attack said the soldiers spent about 40 minutes during the raid. Also, a senior US official said no country was shared the secret intelligence collected before the raid, including Pakistan.
"Very few people in our government knew about the raid before it was launched," said the official.
President Obama announced that the US forces successfully recovered Osama's body after a "firefight". Subsequently, a DNA test confirmed that it was indeed Osama who was killed. Officials from the US Department of Defense Pentagon said Osama was buried at sea after prayers were performed for him on a US aircraft carrier.
The reason for doing this, as explained by the then US CIA Director Leon Panetta, was to avoid burying him on land, as his grave could become a place of worship.