"I confronted bin Laden. He looked agitated and was much taller than I expected. I shot him twice in the forehead. Bam! Bam! He crumpled to the floor in front of the bed and I fired another one. Bam! He was in a heap, motionless with his tongue out..."
The words of the Team-Six Seal who killed Osama bin Laden in the isolated building complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan, did not come out of his mouth easily.
On that May Day night in 2011, "The Shooter"-the Greek for "the shooter"-was just doing his job, though as he confessed two years later to Esquire, "I wondered if what I had just done was the best or worst act of my life." His name has remained classified today for obvious reasons for three years, and he made it public on a Saturday night in 2014, in the Fox documentary that aired in two sequels.
This is how the whole world came to know Robert O'Neil, the man who first entered the room of the al-Qaeda leader and executed him with three bullets. It was the first time that "the assassin" was exposed on television, since until now, he had kept his mouth tightly shut with the sole exception of the interview he gave to Phil Bronstein for the American magazine Esquire. The latter had to work very hard for this interview with perhaps the most famous Seal. He met him dozens of times, invited him to his home, they had a family dinner together and gradually the "hitman" began to open up to the journalist.
He revealed his stresses and anxieties about the next day away from the Seals, his meager pension, divorce from his wife and uncertainty about his future. The more he "bonded" with Bronstein, the more he talked about his work and the night he saw Osama bin Laden five feet away. By then the "hit man" had taken part in over a dozen special forces missions and had killed over thirty people. When he joined Seals Team 6 (ST6) he could boast that he was among the elite of the most lethal machine in the US armed forces.
The night he and the others put an end to bin Laden's activities, he did not forget the woman who was instrumental in uncovering the hideout where he lived along with the Saudi fundamentalist's wives and children. She was the CIA analyst who was waiting in Jalalabad, Afghanistan for the Seals to return with Laden's body. When they landed, he approached her and presented her with the magazine of his gun, which was missing the three bullets that had split Bin Laden's skull and the right side of his face. Several months later, when the film "Zero Dark Thirty", which depicted the operation to eliminate Laden, was shown, "the assassin" went to see it with his wife and an uncle, who asked him if he had seen it before. His low-voiced reply was anything but: "I have seen the original"...
Source: newsauto.gr
Contents of this article including associated images are belongs Cyprus Times
Views & opinions expressed are those of the author and/or Cyprus Times
Source
