Sohaib Athar - ( twitter ) insomniac tech guy and accidental witness

[LVZ]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/02/us-binladen-twitter-idUSTRE7412MW20110502

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 September 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.

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For those who want to keep up to date on this news in realtime:

http://www.google.com/webhp?btnG=Search#sclient=psy&tbs=mbl:1&q=laden

Google "realtime" via http://www.gooplusplus.com/

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[Las Vegas Mixx]

1. insomnia - it's a programmer's occupational disease :)

[Las Vegas Mixx]

2. Sohaib's photo of Abbottabad (and others)

http://twitpic.com/4s8nfq

http://twitpic.com/photos/ReallyVirtual

[Las Vegas Mixx]

3. Nicholas Jackson - the Atlantic -- "Meet Sohaib Athar" ...

"Most of us Pakistani IT professionals spend our lived shielded from the 'system,'" Athar wrote. "Yes, we sometimes come out of our shells and protest against whatever we believe we have to demonstrate against -- and yes, we do write blog posts and opine and criticize and debate, and sometimes we attend the feel-good TEDx talks to 'spread ideas' -- but living in front of our computers, we rarely get a first-hand experience of the system that we loathe (but one that we have to live in)." Athar went on to conclude that he was shocked and disgusted by the "state of our legal and health system."

Before this morning, though, it had been nearly a year since Athar updated ReallyVirtual.com. "The Guy Who Liveblogged the Osama Raid Without Knowing It" was the title of his most recent blog entry, filed under "Etc." The post: "...is what I am for the next few hours on twitter," he wrote, explaining the headline. "I am too tired and sleepy to blog or talk about it though, but I guess it is finally time to revive this abandoned blog. Maybe tomorrow..."

[Las Vegas Mixx]

4. Tweeting history ( Youtube ) ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dRhTqGgZJs