The former Navy SEAL that had reportedly killed Osama bin Laden in the raid on the terrorist leader’s house in Abbottabad, Pakistan has said that the dead terrorist’s head was so disfigured by the shooting that it had to be pressed back together for proper identification.
Robert O’Neill, the SEAL Team 6 commando penned, ‘The Operator: Firing the Shots that Killed Bin Laden’, in which he claims that it was he, who pumped three shots into bin Laden and that it disfigured his head to be almost unrecognizable.
Much of criticism leveled at O’Neill has been centered around the Special Operations Forces strict code of silence. But the events that unfolded in May 2011 in taking out the world’s most wanted terrorist needed to be told.
O’Neill, in his book, makes the gruesome claim that Osama’s head was so severely destroyed by his gunfire that it had to be pressed back together for identification photographs.
In O’Neill’s version, he was trailing five or six other SEALs climbing the stairs to the compound’s second floor when Osama’s son Khalid appeared on the half-landing with an AK-47.
O’Neill kept his hand on the point man’s shoulder. The two were alone on the stairway, convinced that whoever was on the third floor was strapping on a suicide vest for an explosive last stand.
O’Neill recounts that finally, he decided to take action.
He squeezed the point man’s shoulder, the signal to charge and then burst past the curtain.
The point man tackled two screaming women to the floor.
Bin Laden stood near the bed, his hands on the shoulders of the woman in front of him. She was later identified as Amal, the youngest of his four wives, the report said.
“In less than a second, I aimed above the woman’s right shoulder and pulled the trigger twice,” O’Neill writes.
“Bin Laden’s head split open, and he dropped. I put another bullet in his head. Insurance,” he writes.
After the flight back to Afghanistan, the team positively identified bin Laden and the US government released the information from the raid. O’Neill’s book differs from an earlier one written by Mark Bissonnette called “No Easy Day”
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