Osama Bin Laden is dead: Al Qaeda leader's compound eyed by spies for a year

                         Osama Bin Laden is dead: Al Qaeda leader's compound eyed by spies for a year

Osama Bin Laden is dead: Al Qaeda leader's compound eyed by spies for a year

or nearly a year, American intelligence officials have secretly had their eyes on an ostentatious compound encircled with 12- to 18-foot barbed-wired-topped walls.

The sprawling, $1 million compound in an affluent suburb of Islamabad, Pakistan, sits at the end of a long dirt road and is described by officials as eight times larger than any house around it.

Intelligence officials suspected the compound, with a sprawling, three-story mansion and two security gates, was "custom-built to hide someone of significance."

Last week, they received solid evidence that the compound was built specifically asOsama Bin Laden's luxury hideout.

They said the compound had no phone or Internet hookup, and the occupants were so paranoid they burned their garbage instead of having it picked up.

White House officials said the tip that the house belonged to two brothers, both trusted couriers of Bin Laden and one a protege of 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was obtained from terror detainees.

Before sundown Sunday, a small team of American special operations troops swooped down on the compound with two helicopters, blasting away at the fortress.

The 40-minute gun battle ensued before Bin Laden, who fired at the Americans, one of his adult sons and two other men were killed, according to military sources. A woman being used as a human shield by the Al Qaeda terrorists was also killed in the firefight.

"What's very important is not just that they got him. but how they got him," said Lawrence Korb, a defense analyst at the Center for American Progress. "It was done by [the] U.S. military."