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Osama Bin Laden could "absolutely" have been captured alive, according to the top Navy SEAL who led the mission which killed him.
The hunt for the Al-Qaeda leader took almost a decade and cost hundreds of millions of pounds.
Navy admiral William McRaven masterminded the operation which tracked down the architect of the 9/11 terror attacks to a high-security compound in Pakistan in May 2011.
In a Newsnight interview on Monday evening, McRaven said the extremely tricky mission went "pretty much as we planned with one exception. As you know, we lost a helicopter on the compound in Abbottabad," McRaven said.
"But, having said that, you always plan for the worst-case scenario so we had a Plan A and a Plan B and a Plan C and a Plan D. Plan A went a little askew so we immediately jumped into Plan B, but we got our man."
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Asked by host Evan Davis if there was ever any chance that Bin Laden could have been captured alive, McRaven replied: "Absolutely. I think a lot of people feel that this was a 'kill only' mission and that was not the case. The strict rules of engagement said that if he is clearly not a threat, then you have to capture him, you can't just kill him.
"But, conversely, I made sure the guys knew that if they felt that there was at all a threat, that they had to make the right decision and they have to do that in a split second.
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So you're coming up to the third floor, moving around, you have night vision goggles on, a lot of things are happening - clearly they made the right decision."
Among the Navy SEALS who entered the compound was Robert O’Neill, who became known as the man who killed Bin Laden.
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In his book, The Operator, O'Neill told how he came face to face with the most wanted man on the planet.