'There was a knock at the door and then they shot my husband dead' New details of bin Laden revealed in leaked Pakistani intelligence files
Secretly leaked Pakistani report into historic May 1st raid that killed Osama bin Laden tells his family's story for first time
It is revealed that the al-Qaeda chief was shot in the forehead and his face was clear and recognizable
He spent his last night with his youngest wife, and the two initially thought the noise from approaching Chinook helicopters was just a rainstorm
The terror chief was almost caught shortly after the 9/11 attack, said the wife of one of his guards, when their car was stopped for speeding
Bin Laden was in the habit of wearing a cowboy hat in his Abbottabad compound because he thought it would shield him from U.S. drones
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Osama bin Laden was killed by a shot through the forehead inside his second floor bedroom and his face was 'clear' and recognizable says a secret Pakistani report into the historic U.S. raid to kill or capture the al-Qaeda terror chief.
Just seconds before his life was ended, bin Laden's third and youngest wife Sadah had thrown herself in front of a U.S. Navy SEAL soldier in a vain attempt to save her husbands - getting shot herself in the knee in the process.
And as 'blood flowed backwards over his head', the 29-year-old woman was asked to confirm the identity of the 9/11 mastermind before being told to stand in the corner of the room while the U.S. special forces prepared to evacuate his Abbottabad compound in the northwest of Pakistan.
The wife of Ibrahim al-Kuwaiti, bin Laden's favorite courier also told the commission that her husband was shot dead through a window after answering a knock on the door.
While all previous accounts of the May 1st, 2011 assault have come from U.S. Navy SEAL team members or leaked through CIA or Washington analysts, Pakistan's 'Abbottabad Commission' is the first to piece together testimony from bin Laden's family who were there.
Telling the story of the tumultuous events of that evening through their eyes and those of the local and national officials who responded, the report into the unilateral attack was obtained by Arabic news network Al Jazeera.
Going into never-before-told detail, the report outlines bin Laden was awake just after midnight on May 1st and was startled by what he and his wife, Sadah, believed to be the sound of an approaching storm outside.
Never venturing outside of his fortified and high-walled compound during daylight hours, it is only when the terror chief steps onto the balcony and sees a moonless and and pitch dark night that it dawns on him what is occurring after almost ten years on the run.
As Sadah reaches to turn on a light, bin Laden exclaims, 'No!' and calls to his son Khalid, who is in a first-floor bedroom for assistance. The Americans have arrived.
Rushing to see her five children downstairs, Sadah returns to the second floor bedroom to discover bin Laden praying and reciting verses from the Quaran with his daughters, Mariam, 21, and Sumayya, 20.
Declaring that the moment of reckoning has come and that the sounds they can hear are those of approaching U.S. helicopters, bin Laden instructs everyone to leave him.
Outside, members of SEAL Team Six, containing Pashto and Arabic speakers are already inside the compound - having survived the crash landing of one of the two stealth Black Hawk helicopters that transported them from the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, almost 200 miles away.
Inside the annexe of the large property, Ibrahim al-Kuwaiti, bin Laden's favorite courier is awoken by the loud noise from the detonation of a charge placed on the gate to the compound.
Going to answer a knock on a door, al-Kuwaiti is shot dead as a bullet hits him through the window - dying never knowing that he inadvertently led the CIA to bin Laden in Abbottabad after CIA analysts were tipped off by Guantanamo inmates that he was close to the terror lord.
His wife, Maryam, quickly shouts out, 'You have killed my husband, and now only my children and I are in the room.'
A soldier replies in Arabic for her to open the door and to sit on the stairs of the building while the raid reaches its climax.
Inside the main building, bin Laden's daughter Mariam has not left him as instructed, nor has Sadah.
Mariam steps out onto the balcony as instructed and then suddenly a blast rings out and they hear footsteps on the roof and footsteps on the stairs.
It is then that Sadah sees the ghostly figure of a Navy SEAL on the landing outside the bedroom aiming his red laser dot onto her husband.
Throwing herself at the soldier, he screams 'No!No!' and he shoots her in the knee.
More shots follow and as she lies injured on the bed she hears a soldier repeatedly asking Sumayya and Mariam the name of the man who now lies dead on the floor.
With a wound on his forehead and blood flowing out onto the floor, the girls confirm that the man is indeed their father, Osama bin Laden.
'Sharifa' Siham Sabar, Bin Laden's second wife, who was hiding with Khairiyyah, his eldest, told the commission that upon his father's call, Khalid, her son, ran to aid him.
She said that as she was led outside after the conclusion of the raid she saw Khalid's body lying in a pool of blood on the staircase.
While it is known that the entire operation took 36 minutes, what has not been reported until now is the Pakistani response to the incursion into their territory by U.S. forces.
The commission describes the police conduct as that of 'spectators' and said that only when a senior police Deputy Inspector General Arrived (DIG) did any Pakistani law enforcement enter the compound.
They saw the bodies of Khalid bin Laden, Ibrahim al-Kuwaiti, another courier, Abrar al-Kuwaiti and Bushra, Abrar's wife.
It was then that Khairiyyah, Bin Laden's eldest wife, angrily said to the DIG in broken English: 'Now you come, when everything over!'
Next on the scene was the chief of the army garrison commander in Abbottabad. who arrived at 1.40 a.m. Next to follow were firefighters who attempted to douse the now flaming compound.
Described as a 'collective failure', the Abbottabad Commission details how the local police constable, Nazar Mohammad, arrived just after SEAL Team Six destroyed the stricken Black Hawk helicopter that had crash landed at 1:06am.
At around 2.00 a.m. General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff was informed, and 26 minutes later the last U.S Black Hawk left Pakistani airspace.
At 2.50 a.m. - 36 minutes after all U.S. forces had left Pakistan, F-16 were scrambled from an airbase almost 200 miles away.
It was not until 5:00am that Admiral Michael Mullen, the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (JCSC) called General Kayani, explaining what had happened.
This was the only phone call made between US and Pakistan authorities. General Kayani then waited a further hour and 45 minutes to make his last phone call of the night, at 6:45am - to Asif Ali Zardari - the president of Pakistan.
The report, placed online by the Al Jazeera news network, recounts the testimony of more than 200 witnesses including bin Laden's family members.
On one occasion during 2002 or 2003, bin Laden was almost caught while headed to a market with his security guard Ibrahim al-Kuwaiti and the guard's wife Maryam. The car he was riding in - it's unclear who was driving - was pulled over for speeding, but bin Laden 'quickly settled the matter,' according to Maryam's testimony, and the al-Qaeda leader was once again off and running.
One of bin Laden's relatives said 'The Shaikh,' as he was known, often 'wore a cowboy hat to avoid detection from above' by overhead U.S. drones, and that 'a complete collapse of local governance' allowed him to hide inside the country for six years before U.S. President Barack Obama gave the order to have him killed in a Navy SEAL raid.
That 'kill mission,' Pakistan's official inquiry declared, was 'a criminal act of murder which was condemned by a number of international lawyers and human rights organizations.'
'Due process was deliberately denied the victims,' the commissioners wrote - referring to bin Laden as a victim - 'and their killing was explicitly ordered by the President of the US.'
The US Navy SEALs raid that killed the al Qaida founder in the town of Abbottabad outraged Pakistani officials because they were not told about it beforehand.
US officials have said they kept Pakistan in the dark because they were worried that bin Laden would be tipped off.
The fact that the compound where bin Laden was hiding was located only about half a mile from Pakistan's equivalent of West Point led many in the US to suspect Pakistani officials of aiding him, although Washington never found evidence to back that up.
The report said it also found no evidence that current or former Pakistani officials helped bin Laden hide, although it could not rule it out completely.
It said very little is known about the network of support that bin Laden enjoyed in Pakistan, other than the group of family and backers that lived with him in Abbottabad.
The report attacked all levels of government, including the powerful army and intelligence services, for failing to detect the terror leader as he lived in six different places in Pakistan over nine years.
'To summarise, negligence and incompetence to a greater or lesser degree at almost all levels of government are clear,' said the report, which was based on testimony from more than 200 witnesses, official documents and site visits.
The criticism of the army and intelligence services was noteworthy in a country where officials often steer clear of taking these powerful organisations to task.
The commission recommended the government make the report public for fear it would be ignored or suppressed, but that never happened, even though it was completed months ago.
The report said it was shocking that nobody in the Pakistani government discovered bin Laden while he was living in Abbottabad for six years.
He was in a compound described as 'hardly normal,' because it was isolated from homes around it, had very high walls and was protected by barbed wire.
'The extent of incompetence, to put it mildly, was astounding, if not unbelievable,' the report said.
Among the dozen of new details in the report is the revelation that bin Laden and his supporters waited to build an unauthorized third story on the compound until after a devastating earthquake hit Pakistan in 2005.
According to an account given to the Abbottabad Commission by his wives, with whom he was able to father four children while he was on the run, he often liked to have an apple and a piece of chocolate when he was feeling weak.
The Guardian reports that the terror leader actively encouraged his grandchildren to compete over who could grow the best vegetables.
It also said the children of one of his Pakistani couriers knew him as 'poor uncle'.
The child had reportedly asked why he never went out shopping, and was told he was too poor to buy anything.
Of the raid itself, the commission wrote that bin Laden and his youngest wife Amal were together in the bedroom when the U.S. helicopters first arrived.
'After the evening meal and prayer,' the account reads, 'Amal and the Shaikh retired for the night. Shortly past midnight, they were awakened by the noise of what at first sounded like a storm.'
It wasn't a cloudburst. Minutes later, bin Laden lay dead on the floThe report also explores the case of Dr. Shakeel Afridi, a Pakistani physician who used his position as a public health vaccination volunteer to attempt to be admitted into bin Laden's compound.
The report also explores the case of Dr. Shakeel Afridi, a Pakistani physician who used his position as a public health vaccination volunteer to attempt to be admitted into bin Laden's compound.
Pakistani doctor Shakeel Afridi helped the U. S. track down Osama bin Laden. He was sentenced to 33 years in prison for 'conspiring against the state'
Pakistani doctor Shakeel Afridi helped the U. S. track down Osama bin Laden. He was sentenced to 33 years in prison for 'conspiring against the state'
Although he failed to get in, Afridi got a good enough look at the complex system of locks on the front door to help the Navy SEALs design a specialized package of explosives designed to blow the door off.
He also provided his CIA handlers with crucial information about the voices of the people inside the compound.
Aftridi 'met with the CIA operatives [assigned to him] on more than 25 occasions,' the report concludes, 'and received approximately Rs. [Rupees] 10 million from them.
10 million Pakistani Rupees is equal to about $100,000.
The Pakistani government arrested Afridi and he remains in prison, sentenced to more than three decades behind bars. Despite the doctor's key role in the mission's success, the United States has done little to secure his release.
'[T]he fact is that he was arrested 3 weeks after the raid during which time the CIA could have ferreted him out of the country.'
Al Jazeera's release of the commission's report came on the same day the United States government was exposed for going to great lengths to hide its own collection of information related to the 2011 raid.
The Associated Press gained access to information from the Department of Defense under the Freedom Of Information Act, but only after the Pentagon acknowledged shifting documents to the CIA and purging them from their original files, so it would no longer possess anything it would have to turn over to the news agency.
After: People walk past Osama Bin Laden's compound, where he was killed during a raid by U.S. special forces n Abottabad, Pakistan
Dramatic Reconstruction: This CGI shows what the soldier of U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six could have looked like as the approached Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compound in Pakistan
Ablaze: The compound, within which al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed, is seen in flames after it was attacked in Abbottabad in this still image taken from video footage from a mobile phone May 2, 2011The compound, within which al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed, is seen in flames after it was attacked in Abbottabad in this still image taken from video footage from a mobile phone May 2, 2011
Scene of the 'murder'? Pakistan's commission decided that killing 'the victim' bin Laden in his compound, pictured, was a criminal act since he was executed without due process in a court of law
May 2, 2011 marked the end of bin Laden's reign of terror as the leader of al-Qaeda. President Barack Obama announced that the United States had killed the most-wanted terrorist in an operation led by Navy SEALS
Pakistani doctor Shakeel Afridi helped the U. S. track down Osama bin Laden. He was sentenced to 33 years in prison for 'conspiring against the state'
Thunderclaps or Chinook helicopters? Bin Laden and his youngest wife reportedly thought at first that the Nave SEAL raid's noises were due to a rainstorm
One of bin Laden's relatives said he often wore a cowboy hat to avoid detection by U.S. drones. Pictured - how the terror leader might have looked in a stetson
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