The world watched as U.S. President Barack Obama made the announcement: Osama bin Laden is dead. As the mastermind behind the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and bombings of U.S. embassies, he was listed as one of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists. While he managed to elude capture for years, on May 1st he finally met his demise. Airing in simulcast with the U.S. on Sunday, May 15 at 10 p.m. ET/PT, Discovery Channel presents KILLING BIN LADEN, a one-hour special that provides a comprehensive overview of the bin Laden operation – from the time crucial intelligence was gathered in 2010, through the burial at sea.
KILLING BIN LADEN delves into the details of how the operation was planned and executed, seeking to answer key questions that are to-date unresolved, including: How many special ops forces were involved? From where did they deploy? How did they get in and out of Pakistan without being stopped? How did they scientifically identify bin Laden? Why was one of the helicopters destroyed? What really happened inside bin Laden’s house?
The special taps into the expertise of NBC News’ Chief Pentagon Correspondent Jim Miklaszewski; former CIA Operative John KiriaKou; former Navy Seal Eric Greitens, (Seal Team Six); Blackhawk helicopter pilot Michael J. “Mike” Durrant (shot down in Mogadishu and became “Blackhawk down”); military analyst Dan Goure from the Lexington institute; special ops analyst from GlobalSecurity.org Tim Brown; Lawrence Koblinsky, Ph.D. of John Jay College CUNY Forensic Science Department; and the global resources of NBC News on the ground in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Produced for Discovery by Peacock Productions, KILLING BIN LADEN also investigates how intelligence agents gathered the information that led to bin Laden’s hideout, including the tracking of a senior Al Qaeda courier. In August 2010, investigators tagged the heavily fortified compound, where the courier lived with his brother, as a possible terrorist hideout. Once intelligence experts were convinced that the compound contained a senior “high value” terrorist target with a strong likelihood that it could be bin Laden himself, they launched the plan that would end with U.S. Special Forces making a pre-dawn raid on the compound by helicopter.
