Pakistani intelligence sources on Thursday identified three of four al Qaeda members believed to have been killed by a U.S. airstrike last week, though they have yet to recover the bodies. One of the dead was said to be Abdul Rehman Al-Misri al Maghribi, a son-in-law of al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri. Another was Midhat Mursi al Sayid Omer, an expert in explosives and poisons who carried a $5 million U.S. reward on his head. The third man named was Abu Obaidah al Misri, al Qaeda's chief of operations in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province.| That's two al-Misris (Egyptians) and an al-Maghrebi (Algerian or Moroccan). I can live with that. Madhat Mursi would have been worth the strike himself. Ayman's son-in-law's icing on the cake, and the Kunar ops chief would also be worth a strike. I notice they don't mention the fourth deader. I'm hoping he's somebody just as worthwhile — or maybe even moreso. |
More, from Associated Press...
Pakistani intelligence agents hunted Wednesday for the graves of four al-Qaida militants believed killed in an airstrike near the Afghan border -- including at least one suspected high-ranking al-Qaida figure. ABC News and The New York Times reported that Pakistani officials believe a master bomb maker and chemical weapons expert for al-Qaida was killed in the attack on the village of Damadola last week. He was identified as Midhat Mursi, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, who ran an al-Qaida training camp and has a $5 million reward on his head. Also killed, Pakistani officials believe, was Khalid Habib, the al-Qaida operations chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan, ABC said. The Times, however, said officials were uncertain about whether he was killed.
The Times also reported that Pakistani officials believe Moroccan Abd al-Rahman al-Maghrebi, the son-in-law of al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the man who ran the group's propaganda in the region, was killed in the strike. ABC described al-Maghrebi as a senior operations commander. The newspaper said an Egyptian chief of insurgent operations in a region near the airstrikes also was believed killed and an Egyptian associate of al-Zawahiri's was possibly slain.
Pentagon officials said they had no information on the reported identities of the dead and CIA spokesman Tom Crispell said the agency could not comment. A Pakistani intelligence official said authorities still did not know the names of the dead foreign militants but suspect one was a ranking al-Qaida figure. "We have no names. We know one of them had value in al-Qaida. He had intelligence value in the network, but we are still checking his name," said the official.
Pakistani Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao told The Associated Press the government does not know the identities of the foreigners believed killed in the missile strike Friday, which officials have said targeted Osama bin Laden's top aide, Ayman al-Zawahri. "We are still investigating. There's a possibility that some foreigners were there, but we still do not know," said Sherpao, who was in New York with visiting Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. Sherpao said the government had not retrieved the bodies of any of the four foreign militants reported killed in the raid. He said the bodies may have been taken by a local pro-Taliban cleric, Maulana Faqir Mohammed, who also is being hunted by authorities.
| Al-Jizzles has essentially the same story, complete with the (corrected) mispelling of Mudhat Mursi's name — Rooters carried it as Murfi, but we know he wasn't an Irishman. They give the name of the Kunar large turban as Abu Obaidah al Misri, which'd be Khalid Habib's nom-de-guerre. |