In the end, it wasn't al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden himself that U.S. officials tracked down; it was his courier.

U.S. intelligence officials has been searching for the courier for years, after learning that bin Laden used him to run errands.

According to a report in The New York Times, al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, told U.S. military interrogators years ago that bin Laden so trusted the courier that he likely had him living alongside him. Then, four years ago, interrogators were able to extract the courier's name and aliases.

The detainees said the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. And they said that bin Laden used him to maintain contact with the outside world.

The courier was finally located last August, in a compound about 55 kilometres north of Islamabad, Pakistan, in Abbottabad, the newspaper reports.

The compound appeared to have been recently built and was so large and so secure, that U.S. intelligence officials quickly guessed it must have been designed to hide someone much more important than just a courier.

The compound was nestled in an affluent neighbourhood, surrounded by 5.5-metre tall walls topped with barbed wire. No phone lines or Internet cables ran to the property, the Times said. Two security gates guarded the only way in. The residents burned their garbage rather than put it out for collection.

After eight months of painstaking intelligence work, U.S. President Barack Obama and his team became convinced that they had the right location. Starting in February, Obama led five meetings focused solely on whether bin Laden was in the compound.

Only the president's closest national security aides attended the meetings. Though the U.S. normally shares such counterterrorism intelligence with trusted allies in Britain, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, this time, its lips were sealed tight. Even Pakistani intelligence were not informed.

Finally, Obama decided to "pursue an aggressive course of action," senior administration officials told AP, and gave the go-ahead for this weekend's secret helicopter assault by American military operatives.

The special forces team was under orders to kill the al-Qaeda leader, not capture him. "This was a kill operation," a national security official told Reuters.

Officials decided the mission required such accuracy that the military's sophisticated Predator drones were ruled out. Instead, they chose to go with a small contingent of the Navy's elite SEAL Team Six, who worked under the command of CIA Director Leon Panetta.

On April 29, Obama approved an operation to move in. Helicopters descended out of darkness. Shots were exchanged. Details of exactly how the raid unfolded remain murky -- senior administration officials will only say that bin Laden "resisted."

According to a report in the National Journal, the firefight lasted 40 minutes and resulted in the deaths or capture of 22 people. Bin Laden was killed by a so-called "double tap" – two quick shots -- to the left side of his face.

When the smoke cleared, the al Qaeda courier and his brother were among the dead, along with one of bin Laden's sons. A woman whom an American official said had been used as a human shield by one of the Qaeda operatives was also killed.

The assault forces collected bin Laden's body, loaded it onto a helicopter, and quickly left the scene. Within the day, DNA tests had been run and bin Laden's body was "buried at sea."

With reports from The Associated Press