It was meant to be a silent victory in the War on Terror. A carefully managed assassination of the world’s most wanted terrorist, an operation on Pakistani soil by a squad of US SEALs that Pakistan wasn’t meant to know about until after the event. Osama Bin Laden was meant to be killed and buried before anyone was any the wiser, announced only by a presidential press conference.
Maybe it would have worked that way ten years ago, but Twitter made the possibility of a completely secret operation all but impossible. Sohaib Athor, an IT consultant living in the town where bin Laden had been secretly hiding for the past few years, was the first to break the news: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).
“Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”
Shortly after, he followed up by reporting an explosion that was later found to be the result of a technical fault in one of the American helicopters involved in the operation: “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its [sic.] not the start of something nasty :-S”
Athor, who now boasts nearly 80,000 followers, has since turned down hundreds of requests for interviews, many of which came within hours of his first tweet on the Abbottabad raid. What is perhaps most remarkable about his documenting of the raid was the serendipitous fact that he was the closest person to the raid who happened to be on Twitter at the time.
Athor put this bit of luck down to the relatively small number of Twitter users in Abbottabad, saying: “I am JUST a tweeter, awake at the time of the crash. Not many twitter users in Abbottabad, these guys are more into facebook.”
Nosheen Abbas, the BBC’s correspondent in Islamabad, was the first journalist to successfully contact Athor in what was to prove a long succession of media appearances for the unwitting whistle-blower. Over the course of the next few weeks, local and international news flooded the café he ran to interview the man who scooped the American President on the death of Osama bin Laden.
