Reporting from Washington—
A U.S. special forces team killed Osama bin Laden at a compound inside Pakistan and recovered his body, bringing a close to the world's highest-profile manhunt after a decade-long search, President Obama announced to the world Sunday night."Justice has been done," the president said solemnly in a hastily arranged late-night televised address from the East Room of the White House.
Bin Laden, he said, was "a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children," and his death was "the most significant achievement to date" in the U.S. war against the Al Qaeda terrorist network.
Photos: Osama bin Laden is dead
As described by the president and top administration officials who briefed reporters after the president's speech, the successful effort to track down Bin Laden centered on a trusted courier for Al Qaeda, a man whom officials described as a protege of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
U.S. intelligence officials had identified the courier four years ago, based on information from detainees in U.S. custody who said he was one of the few Al Qaeda couriers trusted by Bin Laden, a senior official said. Two years ago, they succeeded in identifying areas in Pakistan in which the courier operated. In August, they succeeded in finding the man's residence, a walled compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.
The compound had drawn the CIA's interest because it was far larger than residences around it, had walls 12 to 18 feet high that were topped with barbed wire and had few windows in its three-story building. The compound was valued at $1 million but had no telephone or Internet, and all trash was burned on the premises.
To the CIA, the compound appeared custom-built to hide someone of major significance. After years of speculation that the world's most-wanted man was hiding in the caves and rugged redoubts of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, officials now came to believe that he was hiding there, less than 40 miles north of Pakistan's capital, Islamabad.
Obama was briefed on the intelligence in August, but "it took many months to run this thread to ground," the president said Sunday.
"The bottom line of our collection and our analysis was that we had high confidence that the compound harbored a high-value terrorist target … and strong probability the terrorist who was hiding there was Osama bin Laden," the senior official said.
By early Friday morning, the official said, the evidence had become sufficiently certain that Obama, meeting with his top national security advisors in the White House Diplomatic Room, was able to give the go-ahead for a helicopter-borne team of special forces, including Navy SEALS, to attack the compound. It was the fifth formal meeting of his National Security Council on the progress of the hunt, officials said.
The president then left Washington to fly to Alabama to survey tornado damage. As he did so, his national security advisor, Tom Donilon, prepared the formal orders for the operation. On Saturday, White House officials gave a few key congressional leaders advance word that an unspecified national security development could happen over the weekend.
On Sunday, the special forces launched their raid, which lasted approximately 40 minutes, the senior official said. After what the president described as a firefight, they killed Bin Laden. No Americans were injured in the raid, Obama said, although the senior official said that one of the helicopters used in the operation was damaged and had to be destroyed.
Also killed were the courier, his brother, one of Bin Laden's sons, and a woman who officials said was being used as a shield.
White House officials were told at 3:50 p.m. Eastern time that Bin Laden had been tentatively identified as among the dead. DNA tests confirmed his identity later in the day, U.S. officials said.
Vice President Joe Biden and CIA Director Leon Panetta called members of Congress and leaders around the world earlier Sunday night to break the long-awaited news. Obama, himself, called House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), officials said. Shortly afterward, White House officials began alerting reporters to prepare for a rare, late-night broadcast statement by the president on an unspecified national security topic.
In announcing the news, Obama praised the joint efforts of U.S. and Pakistani intelligence, and appealed to Muslims around the globe to support the U.S. action.
"Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader," he said. "He was a mass murderer of Muslims."
In Islamabad, a Pakistani intelligence official also confirmed Bin Laden's death and said that Pakistani forces were involved in the attack on the compound, an assertion that U.S. officials denied. Pakistan had not been informed of the intelligence in advance, U.S. officials said.
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