Introductory overview of available facts

On May 1, 2011, twenty-five highly trained US Navy SEALs raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan where bin Laden, some of his family and his bodyguard had been hiding. The SEALs overwhelmed the compound, and shot bin Laden and another five individuals dead. Hours later, President Obama announced that ‘justice had been done’.

Analyses and opinion promptly followed. While many applauded – including notably UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon – dissenters lamented the decision to kill rather than capture and prosecute bin Laden as an ‘assassination’ or, in the words of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, ‘quite clearly a violation of international law’. Slower to emerge, as well as erratic and inconsistent, were details of the nature of the operation upon which, as explained below, legality in fact depends.

Different versions of the facts have ‘evolved’ over time. The earliest reports suggested that bin Laden was armed and ‘engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house’ and that he had used a woman as a human shield.7 Shortly thereafter, a spokesperson stated that they ‘expected a great deal of resistance and were met with a great deal of resistance’, describing a ‘highly volatile fight out’ in the compound. By other official accounts neither bin Laden nor anyone else in the room with him when he was killed was armed, while the Press Secretary noted somewhat obliquely that ‘resistance does not require a firearm’.