CIA Live Tweets Bin Laden's Death On Fifth Anniversary In Move Critics Call 'Grotesque'

'No, God, why?!'

The CIA has been criticised for 'live tweeting' its 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden as if the killing were happening today.

On the fifth anniversary of bin Laden's death, the CIA began to shared minute-by-minute details of how the operation unfolded, in tweets which commenters called "obscene", "extremely weird" and "morbid".

The intelligence service invited Twitter users to "join us" as it relived the assassination step by step.

Bin Laden, whose name is also spelt Usama bin Ladin, was the head and founder of Al-Qaeda. He was killed by US Navy SEALs in a raid on a compound in Pakistan on 2 May, 2011.

The CIA tweeted out each stage of the mission as it was happening in 2016, using the hashtag #UBLRaid, from commanders approving it to helicopters descending on the compound.

But some commenters didn't appreciate the effort, calling it "extremely weird" and "grotesque":

The tweets reported the events and their times as they happened, including President Obama watching live in a situation room, and the moment the operation continued despite a helicopter crashing.

At 3:39pm Eastern Daily Time, the CIA tweeted: "Usama Bin Ladin found on third floor and killed."

At 7.01pm EDT, it tweeted that Obama had received "confirmation of high probability of positive identification" of bin Laden.

Here are the CIA tweets about the raid in full:

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