Who killed Osama bin Laden? (2013)

Chris Lawrence looks into an account by a Navy SEAL who says he was the one who shot Osama bin Laden.

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Did Robert O’Neill really kill bin Laden?

by Peter Bergen

Former Navy SEAL Robert O’Neill said in an interview with The Washington Post that he was the one who fired the final shot to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011.

Two Special Operations sources confirmed to me that O’Neill was one of the shooters in bin Laden’s room.

But did he really kill bin Laden? And, ultimately, does it even really matter who shot bin Laden since the SEAL raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan was so clearly a team effort.

O’Neill has told his story before in a lengthy profile in Esquire in 2013 in which O’Neill was described not with his real name but only as “the Shooter.”

In the Esquire piece, O’Neill/The Shooter was said to have encountered al Qaeda’s leader face-to-face in the top-floor bedroom of the compound in Abbottabad where he’d been hiding for more than five years.

The Shooter said the al Qaeda leader was standing up and had a gun “within reach,” and it was only then that the Shooter fired two shots into bin Laden’s forehead, killing him. That account was in conflict with the narrative from another raid participant in a wildly successful book, “No Easy Day.”

Another member of the secretive SEAL Team 6, which executed the bin Laden raid, told CNN the story of the Shooter as presented in Esquire is false. According to this serving SEAL Team 6 operator, the story is “complete BS.”

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