Surprisingly the news regarding the death of global terrorist like Osama bin Laden was not first revealed by a massive media company. It was first ever informed publically though a “tweet.” The official announcement of White House, made on Sunday night, only stated that president Obama will
Image via CrunchBasepersonally be delivering an address for entire country at 2230 precisely. Further assumption were made largely on individual basis, that words on street state that U.S. officials have successfully terminated either the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, Leader of Al-Qaeda Bin Laden, or one of the other "national security" target. However, the first direct confident news was brought by Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, through his twitter account. He was the first one to confidently state that the death of bin Laden is going to be announced. He wrote: "So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden."
Greg Sandoval, senior correspondent of CNET, has titled this event to be a major defining moment for citizen journalism. He stated that "Tonight's news was by far the weightiest story that Twitter has ever helped break." Quite interesting, Urbahn was not the only one to tweet about what’s happening around, in fact he was not actually even the first Twitter user to notice something, and break the news of something happening.
Surprisingly an IT consultant, named Sohaib Athar and using the Twitter service under the username "ReallyVirtual," was residing near the same area where all the action took place. Just began tweeting live just as the attack began in Abbottabad, he was unaware of what was actually happening and sometimes he claimed that it was a helicopter. His first tweet read that a "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)."
He then later went on tweeting for several hours of the operation, without any clue what so ever was actually happening, he once tweeted that: “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S”.
Later after the public announcement by President Obama, when he realized that what he was constantly was tweeting about was the death action of a global terrorist, he tweeted:“Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.”
It is hard to believe that someone live-tweeted Osama bin Laden's death, and even more unbelievable is that he did not do so unintentionally, but the timestamps and tweets are apparently completely genuine.
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