US5 min(s) read
Published 11:38 05 May 2026 GMT
The Navy SEAL who killed Osama Bin Laden has opened up about his one major regret 15 years later.
Robert O’Neill, now 50, was part of SEAL Team Six during Operation Neptune Spear on May 2, 2011, when US forces stormed a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed the al-Qaeda leader.
The raid came after nearly a decade-long hunt following the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
O’Neill said the elite unit had just weeks to prepare for the operation, initially unaware of its full significance until senior officials briefed them.
"They said on a Friday, go home and be with your kids, and come back Sunday for a read-in," he recalled, per The New York Post.
"I asked, 'Who’s going to be at the read-in?' It was the vice president, the secretary of defence, the secretary of the Navy," he added. "We’re like, 'What in the world?'"
The team then rehearsed relentlessly, knowing the risks.
"This would be a one-way mission. You’re not afraid you’re gonna die, but you’re prepared for death," he shared. "We were going after bin Laden for the first Americans who were forced to fight al Qaeda, to the death, toe to toe, on a Tuesday morning: the passengers on Flight 93."
"Any one of us could pull ourselves out and live for another 50 years."
"But when you’re on your deathbed, if you could give every single day back for one shot at this motherf**ker...The hardest part is telling your kids goodbye, because death is coming," he added.
The operation itself lasted just nine minutes. After searching the compound, O’Neill said he came face-to-face with bin Laden.
"I recognized him immediately," he said. "I was impressed with how skinny he was. His beard was sort of grey. His hands were on his wife Amal’s shoulders. I took it as a threat; he could blow himself up."
"At SEAL Team Six, we shoot you twice in the head right away. I shot him twice and shot him again with my H&K 416. He crumpled on the foot of his bed," he revealed. "I just shot Bin Laden - like what the f***? Everything I had ever known, everything I planned, just changed drastically."
Moments later, the reality of what had happened began to sink in.
"I have to clean his face, hold his head together and take a picture. One of my guys asks, 'Hey, are you good bro?' I said, 'Yes, what do we do now?'
"He said go find the computers. 'You just killed Osama bin Laden, your life is about to f***ing change, now get back to work,' he told me," he said.
Despite the mission being considered a major success, the Navy SEAL said there is one decision he strongly disagrees with.
Bin Laden’s body was buried at sea to prevent his grave becoming a shrine, but O’Neill believes a different approach should have been taken.
"I would have hung him from a bridge in New York City," he said.
O’Neill has previously said the team was never motivated by fame, instead acting in memory of the victims of 9/11.
"We were going for the single mom who dropped her kids off at school on a Tuesday morning, then an hour later, jumped out of the World Trade Center, pressing down her skirt as her last act of human decency," he said. "She was never supposed to do that."
While the raid marked a turning point, former CIA officer John Kiriakou has revealed how little US intelligence agencies knew about al-Qaeda before the attacks.
"We had not yet captured a high-value target, and we didn’t know a whole lot about al-Qaeda," he said.
Although key figures like bin Laden were known, the network remained a mystery.
"We knew that it was founded and headed by Osama bin Laden," he continued. "The Number two was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had been the founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad...
"Number three had been Muhammad Atif, but we killed Muhammad Atif in a bombing in Tora Bora in October of 2001," he added.
Beyond that, he admitted: "We didn't know anything else about al-Qaeda. We had no idea what the structure of it looked like. We had no idea where the cells were located."
According to Kiriakou, the attacks reshaped the CIA’s role entirely.
"It went from an organization whose mission was to recruit spies to steal secrets to a paramilitary organization whose job it was to travel around the world and to kill as many people as they could kill,” he said.
.webp_ke6C2y?tr=cr-169.8.1505.1344,f-webp,q-70,w-100)