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Inside the bin Laden raid: Navy SEALs ‘never’ intended on capturing terror leader

Turns out Osama bin Laden was wanted more dead than alive.

The Navy SEALs who raided bin Laden’s Pakistani compound never intended to capture the terror leader responsible for orchestrating the 9/11 attacks, according to a new report.

The first SEAL to find bin Laden feared that two of his wives who were trying to shield the al Qaeda leader would be wearing suicide jackets. After shooting one of them in the leg, the SEAL jumped on the women — in case they set off explosives — in an attempt to save two other SEALs.

Although it turns out that neither woman was wearing suicide vests, that’s when a second SEAL, out of the 23 who took part in the mission, shot the unarmed bin Laden twice.

“There was never any question of detaining or capturing him — it wasn’t a split-second decision,” a special operations officer told the current issue of The New Yorker magazine. “No one wanted detainees.”

The White House has said that bin Laden would not have been shot had he immediately surrendered.

The first shot — a 5.56mm bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest, according to the magazine. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second bullet, a round that hit bin Laden in the head right above his left eye.

On his radio, the SEAL shouted, “Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo,” mentioning the name of the operation.

After a short pause, the SEAL said, Geronimo, EKIA” — initials for enemy killed in action, the magazine reported.

Back in DC, Obama paused and said, “We got him.”

The new details on the top-secret bin Laden raid, his killing and subsequent burial at sea emerged today in an 11-page recreation published in the magazine, which hit newsstands today.

Members of Team Six had quietly entered Pakistan on 10 to 12 occasions — including parts of South Waziristan — before the raid in Abbottabad on May 2, the magazine reported.

Most of those missions were focused on the country’s remote tribal areas, although the assault plan in Abbottabad marked the farthest special operations troops had ever ventured into Pakistan.

Once national security officials in Washington, DC, determined that bin Laden was in the compound, they reviewed several possible scenarios to capture or kill him. They considered having special operations troops land outside Abbottabad and sneak into the compound on foot. They had also weighed tunneling under the compound. In the end, they decided on a chopper raid that included busting into the compound.

The SEALs, once on the ground, blew through several gates to get inside bin Laden’s hideout. The entire time, President Obama and his closest advisors were watching on a video feed in Washington.

The sound of the explosions, or of the crashing helicopter, drew a few “curious Pakistanis” to the home, the magazine reported.

A Pakistani-American translator who was part of the SEAL team told them: “Go back to your houses. There is a security operation underway,” according to the magazine.

Inside the home, the upstairs rooms where bin Laden slept were protected by a metal gate that blocked the base of the staircase leading to the second floor, making the downstairs rooms “feel like a cage,’ the magazine reported.

Once he was killed, bin Laden’s body was flown back to the Afghan city of Jalalabad, where a CIA officer and Adm. William McRaven, who had overseen the operation, could see the body, which was placed in a zippered body bag.

Once bin Laden’s body was in US custody, officials went through the process of positively identifying that it was indeed the terror leader.

Photographs were taken of bin Laden’s face and then of his outstretched body — pictures that to this day have never been released to the public.

Bin Laden was believed to be about 6-foot-4, but “no one had a tape measure to confirm the body’s length.

“So one SEAL, who was six feet tall, lay beside the corpse — it measured roughly four inches longer than the American,” an official told the magazine.

The SEALs then planned disposal of bin Laden’s body on the basis of a similar burial they carried out for Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a top al Qaeda terrorist based in East Africa, in 2009.

Bin Laden’s shrouded body was placed “on an open-air elevator, and rode down with it to the lower level, which functions as a hangar for airplanes.

“From a height of between twenty and twenty-five feet above the waves, they heaved the corpse into the water,” the magazine said.

Days later, when Obama met members of the SEAL team at Fort Campbell, Ky., McRaven and team members walked him through the operation, using a red laser pointer on a three-dimensional model of the compound.

At the end of the presentation, the SEALs presented Obama with an American flag that had been on board one of their helicopters.