Man Unknowingly Liveblogs bin Laden Operation

[tekisui]

Source: Daily Tribune

CAIRO (AP) — A computer programmer, startled by a helicopter clattering above his quiet Pakistani town in the early hours of the morning Monday, did what any social-media addict would do: he began sending messages to the social networking site Twitter.

With his tweets, 33-year-old 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.”

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.

His first tweet was innocuous: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”

more: http://www.dailytribune.com/articles/2011/05/02/news/doc4dbeaba99c2b6634988543.txt

[LiberalEsto]

1. "There goes the neighborhood."

Understatement of the year.

[highplainsdem]

2. More on this here, including Luke Russert and Keith Olbermann's reactions:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1003335

See replies 58, 59 and 61.

I've been copying some of the more interesting tweets since the first reports on Twitter last night (before this was mentioned on TV) that OBL was dead.

[suffragette]

3. Must have been very surprising for him to realize this