He was the US government’s prize scalp in the war on terror – and now the gun Osama bin Laden had in his final moments takes the top spot at the CIA.
NBC reports that the AK-47 found next to bin Laden when he was shot dead by SEAL Team Six at his Pakistan compound is the latest addition to the CIA’s private museum in Langley, Va.
“This is the rifle that was recovered from the third floor of the Abbottabad compound by the assault team,” curator Toni Hiley told NBC.
“Because of its proximity to (bin Laden) there on the third floor in the compound, our analyst determined it to be his. It’s a Russian AK with counterfeit Chinese markings.”
The CIA didn’t comment on how the AK-47 was recovered or whether it was loaded.
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Only employees and invited guests can visit the museum, which was first opened in the early 1990s and displays artifacts from 70 years of CIA operations.
It has also housed fake movie scripts and stationary from the 1979 operation in which agents posed as filmmakers to rescue six Americans from Iran — dramatized in the Oscar-winning film, Argo.
Other relics include parts of the life-size model of bin Laden’s compound on which SEALS trained for the Abbottabad mission, a silver dollar that holds microfilm, an underwater drone disguised as a catfish and a chest of white lapis lazuli stones that was seized in Afghanistan and was effectively al Qaeda’s ‘ATM’ to pay fighters.