Inside bin Laden's Compound: What the Cameras Found After the Raid

Once the SEALs had flown out of Abbottabad, the world's cameras went in.

The first footage from inside bin Laden's compound showed what a 40-minute special forces raid leaves behind: bloodstained floors and mattresses, bullet-pocked walls, scattered clothing and personal effects — the domestic interior of a man who had been the world's most wanted fugitive, suddenly exposed as a crime scene.

Outside, the Americans had torched the helicopter that clipped the compound wall during landing — standard practice to keep classified avionics out of enemy hands, and it left the compound's courtyard dominated by a burned-out tail section that became one of the raid's most recognizable images.

Pakistani authorities sealed the area quickly, and most of the interior access was brief. But what leaked out was enough: the contrast between the ordinariness of the household — children's rooms, a kitchen, laundry drying — and the 14-foot walls and barbed wire that had enclosed it. It was the visual proof of what the address had already suggested — that this was not a remote hideout but a functioning home, in a settled neighborhood, in a military town.

The images also closed a chapter on years of speculation about bin Laden's living conditions. He had not been in a cave. He had been in a three-story house with a terrace, behind walls his neighbors had learned not to ask about.