A Twitter User Unknowingly Became The First That Reported The Osama bin Laden Raid

Osama bin Laden was the founder of al-Qaeda. He was shot and killed on May 2, 2011 inside a private residential compound in Abbottabad, by the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group and CIA SAD/SOG operators on the orders of U.S. President Barack Obama.

What apparently meant to be a stealth attack, the news first broke when Sohaib Athar was up late at night do do some software projects.

Just before the attack, when his wife and son were sleeping, Athar heard sounds of whirring above the two-story house where they lived. At first, he thought that an aircraft was flying low over the residential area that night. But as he focused, it was the sound helicopter's blades.

At that time, Athar didn't know that he became the first person to ever report on the news story that would grip the world's attention.

Athar and his family moved to the area in 2009 to get away from the occasional terrorist attacks in Lahore, Punjab. Not long after that tweet, he heard a loud explosion sent a shock wave to the town. This was when he feared that terrorists had finally made themselves known to Abbottabad,

He stayed up until 4AM before taking a few hours of sleep.

At the time, breaking news said that something unusual was happening at Abbottabad but those were speculations. The truth emerged a little later, when televised and addressed that it was an attack on Osama bin Laden.

For Athar, the news was significant, in a way that he realized that through a handful of late-night tweets, he was the first that uncover the international news story.

Athar's Twitter followers increased dramatically, and people from the news agencies and journalists, as well as other Twitter users, were bombarding him with questions and comments. Reporters even flooded into the coffee shop owned by Athar and his wife after moving to Abbottabad.

He ignored most of the more than 200 interview requests he estimates he received.

"I wasn't really achieving anything. It wasn't really helping me out in any way," he said. "At the same time, I did want to help out people if I could, especially because there were a lot of wrong facts about Abbottabad and Pakistan that were being reported."

"I was getting accused of being CIA agent, I was getting accused of being an ISI agent," he continued, referring to Pakistan's military intelligence agency. "Some people were emailing me to make sure I actually existed and wasn't a fictional character invented by the intelligence services."