Hussain Jaffri was watching a film on television with his wife when he heard the distinctive whirr of a helicopter swooping low overhead after midnight last Monday morning.
Even in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad, the timing and height seemed strange, and Mr Jaffri rushed to the roof of his house for a better view. From there, he saw a helicopter hovering above a compound just 200 yards away.
"It came from the hillside, flew over the compound, then my house, then five minutes later there were three small blasts," he recalled. Only later did he realise that he was witnessing the dramatic conclusion of the biggest manhunt in history.
Two US Black Hawk helicopters, their rotors heavily modified to reduce detection by radar, had skimmed across north-western Pakistan from American bases in Afghanistan after President Barack Obama gave the final go-ahead for Operation Neptune Spear.
On board were two dozen commandos from the Team Six unit of the Navy SEALs special forces - an elite inside an elite so secret that the US authorities have never publicly acknowledged their existence. Two Chinooks carrying back-up forces followed behind.
The commandos had erupted in deafening cheers, fists pumping the air, when they were called together a few weeks earlier and told the target for their mission.
They had been training for weeks on a mock-up a compound with a three-storey building at its heart. Now they had learned the name of their quarry - Osama bin Laden, the Saudi terrorist mastermind of the 9/11 atrocities, who CIA chiefs believed was living on the top floor with his family.
"When the team was told that Osama bin Laden was the target, a roar went up," Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL officer who headed an al-Qaeda targeting unit, told The Sunday Telegraph.
"A lot of these guys have been involved in this war for more than nine years. They had made great personal sacrifices and seen comrades killed and disabled. And now, after all those years, they finally had the chance to bring him to justice for his victims, their families and the world."
Yet the raid that will go down as one of the most successful commando operations in history almost ended in disaster right at the start.
Plans for the SEALs to abseil into the compound were abandoned when one of the hovering choppers suffered lift problems and the pilot was forced to conduct a controlled "hard landing", striking a wall on the way down.
Back in Washington, the setback raised the awful spectre of the failure to rescue hostages held at the US Embassy in Tehran in 1980, and the disastrous "Black Hawk Down" 1993 assault in Somalia.
But the other Black Hawk landed safely and all 24 commandos jumped to the ground, accompanied by a translator and an explosive-sniffing dog. The men split into smaller teams and one group swept towards a guesthouse.
This building was home to the compound's owner, known locally as Arshad Khan, a Pashtun businessman who hailed from Pakistan's troubled frontier zone with Afghanistan.
Reserved but polite, he would give pet rabbits to local schoolchildren, but did not generally encourage visitors; the high perimeter walls outside his compound, he explained, were necessary because of a bitter family feud.
In fact, he was known within al-Qaeda's highest echelons as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the personal messenger for several years for bin Laden. His movements had first alerted the CIA to the fortified compound less than a mile from Pakistan's top military academy - the country's Sandhurst or West Point.
Despite initial US reports of a prolonged firefight, it later emerged that only Kuwaiti offered armed resistance during the raid, opening fire from behind the guesthouse door before he was slain in a hail of bullets.
Other commandos stormed the main building, killing Kuwaiti's brother - known as Tareq Khan - on the ground floor and then shooting dead bin Laden's 20-year-old son Khalid as he rushed down the stairs towards them, according to the latest US version of events. Both were unarmed.
A fourth person was also shot dead - although even nearly a week later, the identity remains unclear. US officials said it was a woman, believed to be the wife of one of the brothers; Pakistani sources said it was another man.
The commandos, equipped with night vision goggles, helmet-mounted video cameras and communications equipment linking them to aircraft overhead, surged upstairs past barricades, blowing up blocked doorways with explosives.
Amid the chaos, the SEALs got their first sight of the world's most wanted man as he peered out from a doorway. Bin Laden ducked back inside the room as the commandos opened fire, missing with the first shot in the darkness.
With bullets flying, a piece of shrapnel or debris then struck his screaming 12-year-old daughter Safia in her foot or ankle. Her mother, bin Laden's fourth wife, rushed at the advancing men and was shot in the lower leg.
And with bin Laden retreating into the room, two shots to the chest and above the left eye cut him down - a "double tap" in military terminology. He turned out to be unarmed - contrary to earlier US accounts that he had fired off shots while using his wife as a human shield - but there was an AK-47 assault rifle and Russian Makarov pistol in the room.
"He was retreating," said a Pentagon official. "You don't know why he's retreating, what he's doing when he goes back in there. Is he getting a weapon? Does he have a [suicide] vest?"
The SEALs made a preliminary facial identification that the dead man was bin Laden and a team leader delivered news of the kill via a microphone in his helmet.
The message "Geronimo EKIA" (the code name for bin Laden and acronym for "enemy killed in action") was relayed to CIA director Leon Panetta at the agency's headquarters.
He in turn passed the historic message to President Barack Obama and his national security team, who were following events from the White House's top-security Situation Room.
"We got him," was the commander-in-chief's response.
Back in the Abbottabad compound, the SEALs' work was not done.
They swept through the buildings, collecting a "mother lode" of intelligence material - computers, cell phones, thumb drives and written documents. They then headed back into the courtyard where the grounded helicopter had been blown up in an attempt to prevent its "stealth" technology falling into Pakistani hands. A Chinook joined the operation to ferry out the raid team, all uninjured.
After 38 mins on the ground - eight minutes longer than planned in training because of the crashed Black Hawk - the helicopters took off, before the Pakistani military had scrambled forces to the site.
There was an additional "passenger" on the way out - the body of bin Laden.
Pakistani security officials arrived to chaotic scenes. Three women - all believed to be wives of bin Laden - and at least 12 children were left behind, some with their hands tied and mouths taped, others wailed hysterically. Four bodies were strewn around the compound, blood pouring from their wounds.
Safia was cradling the head of her injured mother in the room where she had just seen her father gunned down.
"I am Saudi," she told the officials matter-of-factly. "Osama bin Laden is my father."
The American forces first ferried the terrorist's body to the USS Carl Vinson for DNA tests to confirm a match with members of his extended family. His body was then wrapped in a white shroud while Islamic rites were administered and dropped into the Arabian Sea in a weighted bag, to ensure his final resting place could not become a shrine for extremists.
The raid was the culmination of years of painstaking detective work by CIA agents, after Kuwaiti's name and role had first come up in questioning of al-Qaeda detainees at secret sites in eastern Europe.
Then last year came the key breakthrough when US intelligence listened in to a phone exchange with an old friend.
"Where have you been?" inquired the caller, whose number the agents had. "What are you doing now?"
Kuwaiti's response was vague: "I'm back with the people I was with before."
But CIA agents realised they could have hit pay-dirt if Kuwaiti was signalling, however obliquely, that he was back at the side of the al-Qaeda leader.
And they now had his phone number to track him. Pakistanis working for the CIA spotted Kuwaiti's vehicle in Peshawar and he was eventually tracked to the compound in Abbottabad, despite elaborate subterfuge tactics.
US intelligence then began a scrutiny operation so intense and costly that it required special funding. From the air, satellites and eavesdropping technology monitored the compound around the clock, but with no telephone lines or Internet, it proved impenetrable.
CIA agents also established a nearby safe house to watch the property around the clock.
But although they captured images of a distinctively tall man walking back and forth behind the compound walls, they never established a clear view of the face of "the pacer".
The weight of circumstantial evidence was compelling, however.
Mr Obama was informed that the world's most infamous fugitive could well have been tracked down and preparations for Operation Neptune Spear were put in place.
US intelligence teams are this weekend poring over the material retrieved from the compound. They have already established that bin Laden was much more than simply a figurehead figure during his fugitive years, taking an operational interest in plots such as one to attack US railways on this year's 10th anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks.
For those involved in such hunts, the success of Operation Neptune Spear is an inspiring illustration of the merit of dogged intelligence work.
As former CIA director Michael Hayden noted last week, the road to bin Laden's lair was not even built "brick by brick", but "pebble by pebble".
