How Navy Seals killed Al Qaeda chief near Islamabad
With heavy cloud rolling in over the town of Abbottabad, conditions were perfect for the raid to take out Osama Bin Laden after ten years on the run.The previous night, the operation had been cancelled because the weather was clear and the U.S. aircraft would have been spotted from a distance.
But at 1am yesterday – 9pm on Sunday UK time – the sleeping citizens were awoken by the clatter of four military helicopters thought to be two Black Hawks and two Chinooks.
They contained more than 100 elite commandos who had been training intensively for days at their airbase, Bagram in Afghanistan, using a detailed mock-up of Bin Laden’s hideaway constructed by the CIA. After dummy runs on April 7 and April 13, they flew to the Tarbela Ghazi airbase in north-west Pakistan, which the CIA has permission to use.