CIA is live-tweeting Osama Bin Ladin’s Abbottabad raid as if it was today

Osama Bin Ladin’s infamous Abbottabad raid will be exactly five years old today and in order to commemorate its 5th anniversary, the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) will live-tweet the whole thing today.

Osama, the head and founder of militant group Al-Qaeda, was killed on May 2, 2011, in a raid conducted by the United States Navy Seals. Code-named “Operation Neptune Spear”, it was a top-secret operation led by the CIA and was a full-scale raid on Osama’s residence in Abbottabad, a city in Pakistan.

The whole operation was also unknowingly live-tweeted by a resident of Abbottabad, Sohaib Athar, who gained a lot of popularity as a result of it. Now, the CIA is taking a leaf out of Athar’s book by doing a live-tweet of the whole operation as if it was happening today.

This isn’t the first time a historic event is being live-tweeted to celebrate its importance; the seemingly unwreckable Titanic was also immortalized in the Twitterverse a few days ago. There’s a dedicated account on Twitter called “Real History Events” that carries out this responsibility. But this is the first time a government agency like the CIA is indulging in this activity.

The Abbottabad raid also holds a special controversial importance in Pakistan for allowing the United States to freely conducting a raid on Pakistani soil. It is still the cause of a lot of speculation about the complicated relationship between the two countries.