A 33-year-old
computer programmer, Sohaib Athar, who moved to the sleepy town of
Abbottabad to escape the big city, became in his own words "the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.".
He did what any social-media addict would do: he began sending messages to the
social networking site Twitter.
His first tweet was : "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)."
Nestled in the mountains around 60 miles (95 kilometers) northeast of the capital, Abbottabad is a quiet, leafy town featuring a military academy, the barracks for three army regiments and even its own golf course.
Soon the sole
helicopter multiplied into several and gunfire and explosions rocked the air above the town, and Athar's tweets quickly garnered 14,000 followers as he unwittingly described the U.S. operation to kill one of the world's most wanted militants.
He tweeted."The few people online at this time of the night are saying one of the copters was not Pakistani,"
As the operation to kill
Osama Bin Laden unfolded, Athar "liveblogged" what he was hearing in real time, describing windows rattling as bombs exploded.
Athar then said one of the aircraft appeared to have been shot down. Two more helicopters rushed in, he reported.
The aircraft might be a drone. The army was conducting door-to-door searches in the surrounding area. The sound of an airplane could be heard overhead.
Throughout the battle, he related the rumors swirling through town: it was a training accident. Somebody was killed.
Soon, however, the rumbling of international events far beyond the confines of this quiet upscale suburb began to dawn on Athar, and he realized what he might be witnessing.
"I think the helicopter crash in Abbottabad,
Pakistan and the President
Obama breaking news address are connected," he tweeted.
Eight hours and about 35 tweets later, the confirmation came: "Osama Bin Laden killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan," Athar reported. "There goes the neighborhood."
http://www.reallyvirtual.com/
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Osama bin Laden didn't have an internet connection or a phone, but for years he was a prolific user of email by saving messages to a thumb drive and having them sent from a distant internet cafe.
