Mission accomplished

Two shots killed Osama bin Laden, one in his chest and one in his left eye. ‘Two taps’ is standard practice for close-quarter shootings — firing twice takes virtually no longer than firing once and you increase (without quite doubling) your chance of an instant kill.

He was in his top-floor bedroom, in the dark, and his killers wore night-vision goggles. He died 15 minutes after the first sounds of attack — the roaring of helicopters, the crash-landing of one outside the compound, the blowing of a steel door in the wall. During those fateful 15 minutes he waited with one of his wives in the pitch black of that small room, paralysed perhaps by fear or indecision and hampered by the design of his house. Block-like, it was built in segregated compartments with few small windows, intended to frustrate observation.  But these very defensive measures also made it difficult for the inhabitants to see or hear what was going on. For five years bin Laden had been confined to the bedroom, another room he used as an office, a covered balcony and a covered outside walkway where he paced up and down (he was known to his observers in Washington, who never saw his face, as the Pacer). The loos were holes in the floor.

He must have heard his attackers blast their way through the massive metal gate that blocked access to the upper two floors, and might have heard the subsequent muffled shots that killed his 23-year-old son, Khalid, on the stairs. On his bedroom shelf he had an AK47 and a Makarov machine pistol, but he didn’t reach for them. Instead, he left his room and unlocked the final metal gate on the stairs in order to peer down to see what was happening, before quickly withdrawing his head and retreating into his room.