Meet the man who live-tweeted bin Laden's demise.

 It didn't take long for the news of Osama bin Laden's death to spread across the world, but before the special reports hit our TV screens and the front pages of the newspapers, the story broke on Twitter.  What started as a simple observation of an unusual event turned into a live account of one of the biggest events in US history, as one Twitter user unwittingly live-blogged the raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed.
 Sohaib Athar, aka @ReallyVirtual, lives in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the town where bin Laden was based. He first reported hearing a helicopter hovering above at 1am, citing it as "a rare event". Shortly afterwards he voiced his concerns about hearing a "huge, window shaking bang", adding that he hoped it wasn't "the start of something nasty".
In an interview with Reuters, Athar said, "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."
 "I tweeted it because it was something unusual in the city," he added.
As Athar continued to tweet about what he could hear going on around him, he and his followers speculated about the reasons for the disturbance.
 Seven hours after Athar's first tweet, President Barack Obama announced bin Laden's death in an operation by US forces, and that one helicopter had been lost.
"Uh oh, now I'm the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it," Athar said on Twitter a couple of hours after the announcement.
Since being recognised as the person who broke the news of the raid, the number of people following Athar on Twitter has jumped from several hundred to more than 70,000.
Initially, his replies to his followers were jovial, but Athar soon became exasperated after his email inbox, Skype and Twitter accounts were flooded by those trying to contact him.
He remains keen to play down his new-found fame:
 "I am JUST a tweeter, awake at the time of the crash. Not many twitter users in Abbottabad, these guys are more into facebook. That's all."
In the United States, Keith Urbahn, is credited with being the first to break to news that bin Laden had been found and killed. Urbahn who describes himself as chief of staff for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, on his Twitter profile tweeted this post more than an hour before Obama's speech.
"So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn."
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