Captured on Twitter: U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden

DUBAI/ABBOTTABAD,  (Reuters) – In the early hours of  Monday, Sohaib Athar reported on Twitter that a loud bang had  rattled his windows in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, adding  that he hoped it wasn’t “the start of something nasty”.
A few hours later Athar posted another tweet: “Uh oh, now  I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.”
In the age of Twitter, perhaps it’s no surprise that the  first signs of the U.S. operation that killed al Qaeda leader  Osama bin Laden were noticed by an IT consultant awake late at  night.
Athar, a resident of Abbottabad where bin Laden was holed up  in a fortified mansion, first noticed the sound of a helicopter  and thought it unusual enough to post via his Twitter account.
“I was awake, working on my computer when I heard a sound of  helicopter. It was rare here. It hovered for about six minutes  and then there was a big blast and power gone,” Athar, 34, said  in an interview with Reuters.
“I tweeted it because it was something unusual in the city,”  said Athar, adding that he moved from Lahore to the city a year  and a half ago to avoid “bomb blasts and terrorist attacks”.
After liveblogging and speculating for several hours over  what happened, it dawned on Athar and those following him that  they were witnessing the end of a worldwide manhunt for the man  held responsible for orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
“I think the helicopter crash in Abbottabad, Pakistan and  the President Obama breaking news address are connected,” said  one of Athar’s followers.
Seven hours after Athar’s first tweet, U.S. President Barack  Obama announced bin Laden’s death in an operation by U.S. forces  where one helicopter was lost.
Twitter, launched five years after the 2001 attacks, is used  by an estimated 200 million people per day, serving as an  internet platform for users to broadcast, track and share short  messages of no more 140 characters in length.
Athar’s tweets, initially peppered with jokes (“Uh oh, there  goes the neighborhood”) eventually turned to exasperation as his  email inbox, Skype and Twitter accounts were flooded by those  trying to reach him (“Ok, I give up. I can’t read all the @  mentions so I’ll stop trying”).
The number of people following Athar, whose Twitter handle  is “ReallyVirtual”, ballooned to nearly 33,000 later on Monday,  from several hundred before.
Athar also runs a coffee shop in the centre of Abbottabad,  across from the Army Burn Hall College school in the same  neighbourhood as bin Laden’s mansion. He fears that his new  hometown, a relatively affluent enclave about 35 miles (60 km)  north of Islamabad,  could now come under attack.
“They can attack military installation and this city has  more targets than anywhere else,” Athar said.
Separately, in the United States, the first indication that  bin Laden had been found and killed came from a another tweet by  Keith Urbahn, who says on his Twitter profile that he is chief  of staff for former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama  Bin Laden. Hot damn,” Urbahn tweeted more than an hour before  Obama’s speech.