Certainly international bureaucracy could slow things down significantly, but that's not my impression ot the story here. It sounds as if it was a local police officer. There was no word of mouth needed; the office should have retrieved the mothers phone number from the file and rang her. Not only is it the professional thing to do, but it's authorative. As others have mentioned seeing a tweet about your daughter online is probably going to raise more questions than it answers. I know if I was in that situation I would rather have a call from an officer giving me full details, than find out 5 minutes earlier on a tweet that doesn't give me full details and that doesn't give me proper channels to find out more information.

I'm a little confused about what is 'not necessarily a good thing' - are you suggesting the media should release the dead soldier's name immediately, or that his/her name should not be released through the media at all?