New York exhibition details 10-year hunt for OBL

NEW YORK: With a model of the Pakistani villa where he lived and a video of Barack Obama explaining his hesitancy about approving the raid, a new exhibition details the operation that killed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

"Revealed: The Hunt for Bin Laden", which opens Friday at the September 11, 2001 attacks museum in New York, plots the ten-year search for the brains behind the single deadliest attack ever on the United States.

"It´s like being in the front row of history," Alice Greenwald, president and chief executive of 9/11 Memorial Museum, told AFP. "We get an insider´s view into ... how the raid was actually conducted from the people that were there," she added.

The US intelligence services-led manhunt culminated overnight on May 1 and 2, 2011 with operation Geronimo, the commando raid that left Bin Laden, the orchestrator of the atrocity that killed almost 3,000 people and destroyed the Twin Towers, dead.

The exhibition, which will run until May 2021, contains no shattering revelations, such as possible collaboration between American and Pakistani spies. But using around 60 objects, including some seized in the villa, and dozens of photos and videos, visitors can see the work of the intelligence services as they try to find the Al-Qaeda leader.

The time line includes bin Laden´s departure without a trace from the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan in late 2001 and the key identification of his messenger Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti and his jeep in Peshawar in 2010. Al-Kuwaiti would lead US agents to the quiet garrison city of Abbottabad and the villa where a mysterious figure would take a few steps inside the compound every day, like a prisoner.