US News

Osama’s escape kit in clothes

He was ready to run.

Osama bin Laden had cash and the phone numbers of suspected allies sewn into his clothes to aid in a hasty retreat from his luxury hideout in Pakistan in case he was tipped off to a US attack, officials said yesterday.

The heroic Navy SEAL team that took out the al Qaeda founder Monday morning (Sunday afternoon in New York) found 500 euros ($740) and the two phone numbers on a piece of paper stitched into his clothes, according to the CIA.

That bin Laden, the most wanted-man on Earth, had such a simple escape plan suggests that he had supporters throughout the Abbottabad region, some 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, CIA Director Leon Panetta told lawmakers yesterday in a closed-door briefing.

“His network was strong enough he’d get a heads-up” of a planned US strike, congressional sources quoted him as saying, Politico.com reported.

Other new details of the raid that stunned the world emerged yesterday.

A senior US official told ABC News that the CIA-run Operation Neptune’s Spear “was a kill mission,” contradicting earlier administration assertions that the team had the option to capture bin Laden.

Officials have said bin Laden himself was not armed when he was shot and killed. NBC reported last night only one of the five people killed was armed.

White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to comment on the changing narrative.

“In terms of the operational details, we have gotten to the point where we cannot cross lines because of the necessity for preserving the methods and operational techniques,” Carney said.

But Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress that there was no doubt the killing was 100 percent legal.

“The operation against bin Laden was justified as an act of national self-defense,” he said.

Reuters yesterday released pictures of three other men killed in the assault — bin Laden’s 24-year-old son, Khalid, his courier, Abu Ahmed, and the courier’s cousin or brother.

Unlike bin Laden’s body, which was seized, their bloody corpses — with telltale signs of precision gunshot wounds — were left in the compound.

Meanwhile, praise went to a former SEAL, Vice Adm. William McRaven, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, who was in charge of the bin Laden raid.

“He is a stud . . . When things were at their tensest, he just got cooler,” one official told ABC.

It also emerged that the helicopter that malfunctioned at the start of the raid broke a rotor on an 18-foot compound wall as it hovered above it.

In an encouraging development in the wake of bin Laden’s death, Saudi Arabia said one of its most-wanted al Qaeda terrorists, Khaled Hathal Abdullah al-Atifi al-Qahtani, called to surrender.

chuck.bennett@nypost.com