The former US Navy SEAL who claims to have killed Osama Bin Laden has detailed the terrorist’s final moments.
Robert J. O'Neill was part of Operation Neptune Spear, which saw the US's elite Seal Team Six successfully locating and killing the founder and first leader of the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda.
Bin Laden was fatally shot at his compound in the city of Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.
O’Neill has claimed that he was the man who fired the fatal shots and has spoken out about his experiences many times over the years.
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Speaking on the Full Send Podcast in 2022, O’Neill shared what drove him to be a part of the operation.
He said: "We said 'We're not going after bin Laden for the fame or for the money.
"We're going after Osama bin Laden for the single mom who dropped her kids off at elementary school on a Tuesday and then 45 minutes later, she jumped to her death out of a skyscraper because that's a better alternative than whatever the hell was going on inside the 2000 degree Fahrenheit.
"And her last gesture of human decency was to hold her skirt down as she killed herself.
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"She was never supposed to be in the fight. We're supposed to be in the fight."
Opening up about the deadly mission, on The Shawn Ryan Show, he said: “I can hear bin Laden taking his last breath. When I shot him he fell to the foot of the bed.
“I shot him in the face three times. I moved Amal [bin Laden’s wife] and… his two-year-old son is now standing there, and this is the humanity of everything. This kid has got nothing to do with this. I’m a father. I picked him up and I move them to the back of the bed.”
O’Neill said after firing the fatal shots he ‘sort of froze’ as other SEALs came into the room.
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He went on: “A lot of guys are in there and one of my guys came up to me and he said, ‘are you good?’ and I said, ‘no - what are we supposed to do now?’ And he said, ‘now we find the computers. We do this every night - hundreds of times'.
“And I’m, like, ‘Yeah, holy s**t.’ He said to me, ‘you just killed Osama bin Laden - your life has changed, get to f**king work'. And so we did."
He went on to say that the team then took some photos of bin Laden - but said that the photos hadn’t been released as people ‘don’t need to know how justice looks when it’s served’.
Topics: US News, World News
Claire Reid