Sohaib Athar was jolted upright by the low-flying buzz of helicopters passing over his home next to Abbottabad’s Jalal Baba auditorium. In this sedate garrison town ringed by jagged peaks, the gentle thrum of the day is reduced to a whisper by night. “The helicopter was circling around for five to six minutes,” Athar tells TIME. “It’s not commonplace here.” In what soon became among the world’s most read tweets that day, Athar alerted his Twitter followers: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM” on Sunday morning Pakistan time. For the next half hour, he live-tweeted what he was hearing, without the faintest inkling that his tweets were the first public record of Osama Bin Laden’s final moments. In less than 24 hours, Athar’s name was trending and his followers had swollen incredibly from some 800 to now 55,000 — and counting.
Moments after Athar first heard the helicopter, the force of a loud explosion rattled him. “I heard the blast and everything shook in my room,” he says, sitting in the Coffity cafe that he and his wife run. The sound was keenly recognizable to the couple; it was the reason why they had left their native Lahore, where suicide bombs have wrought terror regularly over the past two years. “But unlike the aftermath of those blasts, there were no ambulance sirens.” All he could hear was the sound of a car racing through empty, quiet streets. And then the familiar sound of a helicopter in flight returned, before it, too, faded away.
