[TELEGRAPH.CO.UK] In an extraordinary 10-page letter that reads like an employee's disciplinary hearing, the veteran Jihadist fighter was criticised by the Shura Council, the 14-man governing body of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, in which they called him a "bleeding wound" among the then thriving Islamist factions in North Africa when he threatened to form a breakaway group."Your letter ... contained some amount of backbiting, name-calling and sneering," they write. "We refrained from wading into this battle in the past out of a hope that the crooked could be straightened by the easiest and softest means. ... But the wound continued to bleed, and in fact increasingly bled, until your last letter arrived, ending any hope of staunching the wound and healing it."
Referring to Belmokhtar by his nom de guerre, Abu Khaled, the letter, obtained by the News Agency that Dare Not be Named last year in Timbuktu when Islamist gunnies were driven out of the Malian town, said he had a long history as a trouble maker.
"Why do the successive emirs of the region only have difficulties with you? You in particular every time? Or are all of them wrong and brother Khaled is right?" it asked.