New York/Tenleytown:
Although it has yet to be confirmed, it is widely believed that the elite United States fighting force SEAL Team 6 carried out the raid which killed Osama bin Laden in his compound in Pakistan.
The SEALs - an acronym which stands for Sea, Air and Land - stormed the compound and shot bin Laden dead after they saw him appear to lunge for a weapon.
According to White House spokesman Jay Carney, the SEAL team that raided the compound where bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, Pakistan, had the authority to kill him unless he offered to surrender, in which case the team was required to accept the surrender.
"The people who conducted this operation were some of the elite of the elite. They were Navy SEALs who passed through the hardest military training in the world, and prior to this operation they would have engaged in relentless preparation. They would have practised again and again and again, in order to make sure that no matter what happened on the objective, they could still execute their mission," said Navy Seal Eric Greitens.
The training is so tough that about 70 percent of every class of SEALS do not complete it.
"During that training they are pushing you to do rucksack marches with 40 pound rucksacks through the middle of the night, you're running in soft sand on the beach, doing two-mile ocean swims, you've got teams in small rubber boats that land on jagged rocks in the middle of the night. There are all of these difficult things that they do to push you to your mental, physical and emotional limits," Greitens said.
The names of the SEAL team members won't be released for security reasons, and they will be honoured in private for their heroic efforts but according to Basu, SEALs aren't motivated by pubic recognition.
"They do it because they want to be the absolute best at what they are, and that's where the pride comes from, to have other warriors look at you and say you're the best at what you do. So the people that did this op, they can in the ranks of warriors they can hold their heads high and say 'I took out the worst bad guy,'" according to former SEAL Eric Basu.
Officials have said the two dozen SEALs involved in the operation are now back at home base, and their extensive debriefing is complete.
US officials have begun to comb through the intelligence trove of computer files, flash drives, DVDs and documents that the commandos hauled out of bin Laden's hideaway.