American forces were led to Osama bin Laden by his most trusted courier, a Kuwaiti-born man named Sheikh Abu Ahmed.

The shadowy figure was identified after Al Qaeda commanders held at Guantanamo Bay admitted they knew him - and that he had connections to Bin Laden.But the confessions were only the start of an extraordinary manhunt which stretched from to downtown Peshawar and finally ended in a deadly shootout at the Al Qaeda commander's luxury compound. For many years, Ahmed was only known by his 'nom de guerre', Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.
The first indications about his significance came from CIA detainees shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks.
They identified him as one of Bin Laden's couriers, an aide the terror chief trusted with his life.
But details were scant and agents quickly found the trail went cold.
It was not until 2004, when top Al Qaeda operative Hassan Ghul was captured in Iraq, that the CIA made any progress.
Ghul told the CIA that al-Kuwaiti was a courier and that he was close to Faraj al-Libi, who replaced Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as Al Qaeda's operational commander.Then the U.S. captuted al-Libi.Under CIA interrogation, al-Libi admitted that when he was promoted to succeed Mohammed, he received the word through a courier.
But he made up a name for the courier and denied knowing al-Kuwaiti, a denial that was so adamant and unbelievable that the CIA took it as a lie.Finally, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself admitted that he knew the courier. Held at Guantanmo Bay, he had been waterboarded 183 times without identifiying Ahmed.
It was only later under conventional interrogation techniques that he admitted he knew him - though he still did not surrender a full name or where the courier could be found.The CIA were now convinced that if they found Abu Ahmed they would find Bin Laden.
They flooded the field with agents, scouring Pakistan and Afghanistan for the merest whisper of Ahmed's whereabouts.
His family, still in the Arabian Gulf, were traced, their communications monitored and it was from this surveillance that the CIA finally got his full name and an idea of his location.When Ahmed was finally tracked down, he was driving a white Suzuki in Peshawar, a frontier town with a high population of Al Qaeda sympathisers.CIA agents followed him to a compound in the northeast Pakistani town of Abbottabad, where al-Libi had once lived. It had 18ft high walls, barbed wire, and no telephone or internet connections.Without confirmation and with little to go on, the CIA became convinced they had finally found the world's most wanted.By February this year they were ready to act. They initially considered bombing the site to smithereens - but Barack Obama rejected the plan as there would be no proof Bin Laden was dead.
And then there were additional complications.America's strained relationship with Pakistan was plunged into fresh turmoil by the arrest of Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who had shot dead two Pakistanis in January.U.S. officials feared that he would be killed if Bin Laden was executed. A tense few weeks ensued until Davis's release on March 16.Then there was the matter of WikiLeaks. Just weeks before Sunday night's raid, the whistleblower website had published a tranche of new secret documents. These made reference to named ‘couriers’ carrying Bin Laden’s message to his followers, and also to Abbottabad as a possible Al Qaeda bolthole.There was a real risk that Bin Laden would flee once again, thwarting U.S. attempts to capture or kill himIn the early hours of May 1,  two dozen members of the Navy's elite SEAL Team Six went in.Bin Laden was shot twice, once through the head. His daughter, 12, watched him die.
The squad left the compound with a trove of computers and files.Three others also died - a woman who is said to have been used as a human shield and Ahmed's brother among them.Ahmed himself, Bin Laden's closest lieutenant, who had finally given him away, was also killed.Today, it emerged that there were 17-18 people in the compound at the time of the attack and the Navy Seals cans took away one person still alive who could be a Bin Laden sonThose who survived the attack included a wife, a daughter and eight to nine other children who did not belong to Bin Laden. They were tied up taken away by the troops.U.S. officials believe that Bin Laden had lived within the blacked-out for up to six years. He had been living in Afghanistan before a 2001 U.S. invasion helped topple its Taliban regime.
'Well I think the latest information is that he was in this compound for the past five or six years and he had virtually no interaction with others outside that compound. But yet he seemed to be very active inside the compound,' White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan said.

'And we know that he had released videos and audios. We know that he was in contact with some senior al Qaeda officials,' Brennan added.

'So what we're trying to do now is to understand what he has been involved in over the past several years, exploit whatever information we were able to get at the compound and take that information and continue our efforts to destroy al Qaeda.'