May 1, 2011

Killing of Osama bin Laden

Barack Obama announces that U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad

One helicopter crashed inside the compound and the assault continued without delay or injury. Bin Laden was dead nine minutes after the helicopters arrived.

1 May in Washington, 2 May in Abbottabad

At 1:25 p.m. EDT on 1 May 2011, President Barack Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta and JSOC commander Admiral William McRaven approved execution of the operation, and helicopters departed Afghanistan at 1:51 p.m. Two reached bin Laden's Abbottabad compound at 3:30 p.m. EDT — 12:30 a.m. Pakistan time on 2 May.

One helicopter crashed, but the assault continued without injury to the U.S. team. The damaged aircraft was deliberately destroyed before the force left.

Nine minutes, then forty

U.S. special-operations forces found bin Laden on the third floor and killed him at 3:39 p.m. EDT. The compound-clearing operation ran nearly 40 minutes, and the force departed at 4:10 p.m.

They removed his body and collected material from the compound. Contemporaneous U.S. information put the number killed there at five, including bin Laden.

The account was corrected the next day

At 11:35 p.m. EDT Obama spoke from the White House East Room, announcing that a U.S. operation had killed bin Laden in Abbottabad and taken custody of his body. At 12:59 a.m. EDT on 2 May, the body was buried at sea from USS Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea.

The White House retracted the first briefing's implication that a woman had been used as a human shield, and said bin Laden was unarmed when shot. A woman on the first floor was killed in crossfire; bin Laden's wife was wounded but survived.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The raid and announcement have different calendar dates depending on location: both occurred May 1 in Washington, while the raid occurred after midnight on May 2 in Pakistan.
Official descriptions changed during the first two days. The White House retracted the initial implication that bin Laden or his wife used a woman as a human shield and clarified that bin Laden was unarmed.
The exact assault-force composition remains partly classified. Widely repeated claims about a precise headcount and SEAL Team Six should be attributed to reporting rather than presented as fully disclosed official fact.