Former Navy SEAL Robert O'Neill says he fired lethal shots that struck Osama bin Laden's head within a second of seeing the terrorist leader on the upper floor of his Pakistan hideout in 2011.
O'Neill told Fox News that bin Laden said nothing before a bullet tore into his forehead and he slumped to the floor by a bed in a room on the third floor of his compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan, when U.S. special operations forces raided it. "Very quickly I recognized him and it was pop, pop, pop,'' O'Neill said.
He made the remarks in the second part of a two-night Fox News program, "The man who killed Osama bin Laden,'' based on interviews with O'Neill and his claim to be the one who fired the shots that killed the terrorist leader.
In the first part Tuesday night, O'Neill said he and other team members thought they were on a suicide mission. In Wednesday's segment, O'Neill said he encountered bin Laden after climbing stairs from the second floor behind another SEAL team member.
The first SEAL fired an initial shot up the stairs, O'Neill said, and they both went up. When they reached the top of the stairs, the first SEAL encountered two women and shoved them aside and to the floor, assuming they were about to detonate explosives, O'Neill said.
That left O'Neill face to face with their target. He said he shot bin Laden three times in the face, twice quickly and a third time after bin Laden was on the floor.
"He just fell by the left side of the bed,'' O'Neill said. "It was less than a second, half a second.'' He said he remembers clearly hearing bin Laden expel his last breath. The team put bin Laden into a body bag and dragged him downstairs and across the grounds to their helicopter.
A second helicopter that was part of the raid had been forced down in a controlled crash inside the compound after losing lift. O'Neill credited the pilot's skills in preventing any fatalities in the crash.
Aboard a helicopter with other team members heading back to Afghanistan, O'Neill said another SEAL asked the group who shot the target, bin Laden. "I think I did,'' O'Neill said he told them, prompting another SEAL to thank him.
The version of events O'Neill described differs in some details with the account in the book No Easy Day, written by another SEAL team member, Matt Bissonnette, under a pen name.
O'Neill said he did not dispute the other account. "I think war is foggy and I think that the author is telling the story as he saw it,'' O'Neill said. U.S. special operations leaders have been critical of O'Neill for making public comments about the raid, calling them an unseemly quest for attention that is damaging to the special forces program.
O'Neill said he expected his decision to speak publicly about the raid, despite a code of silence among Navy SEAL special operations forces, would upset some and bring personal risk to himself.
But he said he did not believe he was revealing secrets. "I don't believe I'm saying anything that hasn't been said and confirmed by high ranking officials,'' he said. "Yes there's personal risk but I've accepted personal risk before. It's bigger than me. It's not about me,'' O'Neill said.
Source: USA Today
