This is one of those side-bar stories from another corner of the world which may turn out to be a little bit of history of particular interest to new media fans. Over at Mediaite, Hot Air friend Tommy Christopher brings us the story of an IT geek living in Pakistan who may, without even knowing it, have been live tweeting the US assault on the compound where terrorist leader bin Laden had been hiding out.

Pakistani IT consultant Sohaib Athar has effectively obliterated my little corner of Twitter history by live-tweeting the assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound – which resulted in the terrorist leader’s death – without even knowing it. Under the Twitter handle @ReallyVirtual, Athar’s historic tweets began innocuously enough with this observation: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event),” and jokingly threatening to take out his “giant swatter.” (h/t Shoq)

Athar’s twitter feed from that evening is really remarkable. He cracks jokes about the unwelcome noise level and how he moved there to find a safer and quieter place to live, but was annoyed by all the aircraft noise. I’ll include a few sections of it here, but the full feed is available at Tommy’s site.

Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).

Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/
A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S

@m0hcin all silent after the blast, but a friend heard it 6 km away too… the helicopter is gone too.

@raihak Funny, moving to Abbottabad was part of the ‘being safe’ strategy Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicpoters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours”, so must be a complicated situation#abbottabad

@tahirakram they’re not saying anything

The abbottabad helicopter/UFO was shot down near the Bilal Town area, and there’s report of a flash. People saying it could be a drone.

@wqs figures, if they have the right to shoot planes flying over the president house, the must have the same instructions for PMA

@smedica people are saying it was not a technical fault and it was shot down. I heard it CIRCLE 3-4 times above, sounded purposeful.

@tahirakram very likely – but it was too noisy to be a spy craft, or, a very poor spy craft it was.

@smedica It must have been more, I started noticing the helicpoter when the noise got irritating – which part of Abbottabd are you in?

@smedica I live near Jalal Baba Auditorium

@smedica ’safer’ is a relative term that has lost its meaning in Pakistan

Here’s the location of the Abbottabad crash according to some people >>> http://on.fb.me/khjf34

Two helicpoters, one down, could actually be the training accident scenario they’re saying it was >> http://bit.ly/ioGE6O
and now I feel I must apologize to the pilot about the swatter tweets :-/

And now, a plane flying over Abbottabad…

Still checking, but if this is legitimate, it’s pretty remarkable. The entire world is connected over the web and there’s always somebody watching – pretty much everywhere – and more and more they are likely to have a cell phone, laptop, etc. and access to social media. Here’s a guy who was just trying to get some sleep and, unbeknown to him, was witness to a seminal moment in history and live tweeted it.