Osama bin Laden was tracked down not in a cave in the wilds of Afghanistan, but in an apparently comfortable mansion only a few hundred yards from the military academy known as Pakistan's Sandhurst.
His compound, hidden behind high security walls, was within a mile of the Pakistan Military Academy in the garrison town of Abbottabad.It is in the Hazara district of Pakistan's North-Western Frontier province - renamed last year as Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa province - less than 50 miles north of the capital Islamabad.
Despite its proximity to the lawless tribal areas where Islamist extremists have established strongholds, the town is firmly under government control, with thousands of troops based there.
For years, Pakistan's ISI security agency has been blamed for fostering the Taleban movement that gave the al-Qaeda leader sanctuary in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden's video statements gave little clue to his where-abouts. But he was tracked down to the building in Abbottabad. Known as the "City of Pines", it was founded as a British garrison town in the 1840s and named after its first deputy commissioner, British officer Major James Abbott.
American officials were "shocked" when they first saw the "extraordinarily unique" compound.
The £600,000 high-security compound stood out, with its 12-18ft walls and two security gates protecting a house roughly eight times larger than any others in the area, Washington officials said.
Built in 2005 at the end of what was then a narrow dirt road on the outskirts of the town centre, the main structure, a three-storey building, has few windows facing the street. Behind the barbed wire-topped walls, internal walls sectioned off certain areas while a terrace on the third floor had an additional "7ft privacy wall".
"When we saw the compound, we were shocked by what we saw - an extraordinarily unique compound," the officials said.
While neighbours left their bins out to be collected, residents of the compound burned their rubbish on site.
The "courier" who aided bin Laden - who was linked to the property by US intelligence agents - and his brother had "no explainable source of wealth", and the property had no telephone or internet services associated with it.
The officials went on: "Intelligence analysts concluded that this compound had been custom-built to hide someone of significance."
