Describing the moments after pumping three bullets from his weapon into former Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden's head at his home in Pakistan's Abbottabad city in 2011, the former US Navy SEAL Robert O'Neill said he heard his last breath audibly.
"I was standing above him when he took his last breath and I heard it audibly," PTI quoted O'Neill as saying.
Recollecting the images from 2 May 2011, he described his entry to the den of the terrorist, who had brought the worst misfortune in the lives of Americans when Al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Centre and Pentagon on 11 September 2001, killing over two thousand people.
"I'm looking at Osama bin Laden's house, and I'm thinking, this is so cool," O'Neill said.
"I turned to the right, and standing on two feet in front of me, with his hands on his wife's shoulders behind me was the face I'd seen a thousand times, UBL," he added. (As Laden's first name was also spelt as Usama, he was referred UBL)
"My first thought was, we got him. After weeks of training, 82 mins into flight, I'm like, I'm on this mission, we're gonna kill [UBL]. Very quickly I recognised him, pop pop pop, in the face three times. He just fell. We met for a second, that's it. We got him. We just ended the war," Mirror quoted O'Neill as saying.
Despite finishing off the mastermind of 9/11 tragedy and Al-Qaeda's head Laden, their fear hadn't subdued as their journey back to Afghanistan from Abbottabad was in danger. They feared that any moment a bomb would strike their flight and they would be shot down from the sky.
"Eighty-something minutes into it, somebody came over the radio to everybody and said, 'All right gentleman for the first time in your lives you're going to be happy to hear this.... welcome to Afghanistan'," he said.
"And everyone was like; oh my God.... we just did it. We just pulled it off and we got him. And we all lived. We're all fine. It was insane. So then, there was high-fiving and stuff. Guys were, cause I mean, we got Usama bin Laden and we're going to live....amazing," he added.
Although he ended the fear and anger with which the Americans lived after the 9/11 incident, O'Neill was sceptical about his actions. "I'm still trying to figure out if it's the best thing I ever did, or the worst thing I ever did," he said in an interview with Fox News in the programme 'The Man who killed Osama bin Laden.'
SEAL is United States "Navy's principal special operations force and a part of the Naval Special Warfare Command and United States Special Operations Command."
