Man Live-Tweets bin Laden Attack

It turns out that the attack on Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad was live-tweeted by a Pakistani man—although he didn’t realize the significance of the events he witnessed. Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant, tweeted at 1 a.m. local time Sunday that a helicopter was overhead, a “rare event” for the location. “Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/” he tweeted; then, “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S”. Soon, he began piecing things together: “the few people online at this time of the night are saying one of the copters was not Pakistani…”; “Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicpoters, and since they’re saying it was not ‘ours’, so must be a complicated situation#abbottabad.” After concluding that the helicopter noise and President Obama’s address “are connected,” Athar was annoyed: “I guess Abbottabad is going to get as crowded as the Lahore that I left behind for some peace and quiet. *sigh*”. And after discovering he had thousands of new followers, he wrote, “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.”