WASHINGTON – Al Qaeda’s second-highest-ranking leader, accused of masterminding the 1998 deadly attack on US embassies in Africa, was killed in Iran three months ago, intelligence officials have confirmed.
The anniversary of the embassy’s attack, Aug. August, saw Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, shot dead by two assassins on a motorcycle on the streets of Tehran, along with De Gire Abu Muhammad al-Masri. Miriam, the widow of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza bin Laden, and his daughter Miriam were also killed.
According to four officials, the attack was carried out by Israeli operatives at the behest of the United States. It was not immediately clear if any role was played by the United States, which has been monitoring the activities of Mr al-Masri and other law activists in Iran for years.
The assassination was led by a geopolitical conspiracy and anti-terrorism spy who is rumored to have killed al-Masri but has not been confirmed to date. For reasons yet unclear, al Qaeda has not announced the death of one of its top leaders, Iranian officials have covered it, and no country has publicly claimed responsibility.
Mr al-Masri, about 58 years old, was one of al Qaeda’s founding leaders and was believed to be the first to lead the organization after his current leader, Amen al-Zawahiri.
Long featured on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List, he was convicted in the United States of crimes related to the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which 224 people were killed and hundreds wounded. The FBI offered a 10 million reward for information leading to his capture, and his picture was on the Most Wanted list as of Friday.
It was surprising that he lived in Iran, seeing that Iran and Al Qaeda are bitter enemies. Iran, a Shia Muslim theocracy, and the Sunni Muslim jihadist group, al Qaeda, have fought each other on the battlefield in Iraq and elsewhere.
U.S. intelligence officials say Mr. al-Masri has been in “custody” of Iran since 2003, but he has been living freely in Tehran’s Pasaran district since at least 2015.
Around 9pm on a summer night, he was driving his white Renault L90 sedan with his daughter near his home when two gunmen on a motorcycle approached him. Five bullets were fired from a pistol equipped with a silencer. Four bullets from the car hit the driver’s side and five collided with a nearby car.
As soon as news of the shooting broke, Iran’s official news media identified the victims as Lebanese history professor Habib Daoud and his 27-year-old daughter Maryam. The Lebanese news channel MTV and social media accounts reported in a report linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that Mr Daoud was a member of the Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah in Lebanon.
It seemed plausible.
The killings came during a summer of repeated bombings in Iran, escalating tensions with the United States, days after an explosion in the port of Beirut and a week before the United Nations Security Council considered extending a ceasefire against Iran. Speculation was rife that the killings could be a Western provocation aimed at provoking a violent Iranian response before the Security Council vote.
And the targeted killing by two gunmen on a motorcycle fits into the modus operandi of the previous Israeli assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. Israel will kill a Hezbollah official who is committed to fighting Israel, which also seems meaningful, except for the fact that Israel consciously avoided killing Hezbollah activists so as not to provoke war.
In fact, there was no Habib David.
Some Lebanese with ties to Iran said they had not heard of him or his assassination. A search by Lebanese news media found no news of the assassination of a Lebanese history professor in Iran last summer. And there is no record of Habib Dawood, said an education researcher with a list of all the history professors in the country.
An intelligence official said Habib Dawood, aka Iranian officials, had given Mr. Al-Masri a job teaching history. In October, Nabil Naim, a former leader of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, who had long called Mr. al-Masri a friend, told Saudi news channel Al Arabiya the same thing.
Iran may have good reasons for wanting to hide the fact that it is handling an insolent enemy, but it is not clear why Iranian officials initiated the rule of law.
Some terrorism experts suggested that keeping law enforcement officers in Tehran could provide some insurance that the group would not operate inside Iran. U.S. counterterrorism officials believe Iran may have allowed them to remain to conduct operations against the common anti-United States.
This is not the first time that Iran has joined forces with Sunni militants to support Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Taliban.
Colin P., a counterterrorism analyst at the Sofan Center. “Iran uses sectarianism as a hoax when it adapts to the regime, but is also willing to ignore the Sunni-Shiite divide when it suits Iran’s interests,” Clark said. Said Clark.
Iran has consistently refused to allow law enforcement officials to stay. In 2018, Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said that due to Iran having a long and porous border with Afghanistan, some members of the law had entered Iran, but were detained and returned to their homeland.
However, Western intelligence officials said the leaders were detained by the Iranian government, which has since struck at least two deals with al Qaeda, some of which were released in 2011 and 2015.
Although al Qaeda has been overshadowed by the rise of the Islamic State in recent years, it remains resilient and has active allies around the world, the UN anti-terrorism report released in July said.
Iranian officials did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office and the Trump administration’s National Security Council declined to comment.
Mr al-Masri was a longtime member of al Qaeda’s top secret management council, along with Saif al-Adl, who was also held in Iran at one point. The pair, along with Hamza bin Laden, who was preparing to take over the organization, were part of a group of senior law leaders who sought refuge in Iran after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, forcing them to flee Afghanistan.
In 2008, the U.S. According to a highly classified document produced by the National Counterterrorism Center, Mr. Al-Masri was “not in U.S. or allied custody but the most experienced and competent operational planner.” The document describes him as a “former chief of training” who “worked closely” with Mr Al-Adel.
According to terrorism experts, Mr. al-Masri guided Hamza bin Laden in Iran. Hamza bin Laden later married Miriam, the daughter of Mr. Al-Masri.
Ali Soofan, a former FBI agent and law expert, wrote in a 2019 article for the West Point Fighting Terrorism Center that Hamza bin Laden’s marriage only led to the capture of Abu Muhammad.
Mr. Al-Masri’s other daughters married Abu al-Khair al-Masri, no relation, a member of the Management Council. He was allowed to leave Iran in 2015 and was killed in a US drone strike in Syria in 2017. At that time he was the second highest ranking officer in law after Mr. Zawahiri.
Hamza and other members of bin Laden’s family were released by Iran in exchange for Iranian diplomats abducted in Pakistan in 2011. Last year, the White House said Hamza bin Laden had been killed in counter-terrorism operations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.
Abu Muhammad al-Masri was born in 1963 in the Al Gharbia district of northern Egypt. As a young man, he was a professional soccer player in Egypt’s top league, according to an affidavit filed in a lawsuit in the United States. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he joined the jihadi movement that was cooperating to help the Afghan army.
After the Soviets withdrew 10 years later, Egypt refused to allow Mr al-Masri to return. They lived in Afghanistan where bin Laden eventually joined the group that later became the nucleus of al Qaeda’s founder. He was listed by the group as the seventh of its 170 founders.
In the early 1990s, he traveled with bin Laden to Khartoum, Sudan, where he began building military cells. He also went to Somalia to help the army loyal to Somali fighter Mohammed Farrah Aidid. There he trained Somali guerrillas to use shoulder-carrying rocket launchers against helicopters, shooting a pair of American helicopters at the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, now known as the Black Hawk Down Attack.
“When al Qaeda launched its terrorist activities in the late 1990s, al-Masri was one of three close associates of bin Laden, who served as the organisation’s head of operations,” said Joram Switzer, head of the terrorist project. , Said Joram Switzer. Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “He knows with him how and what he brought with determination and since then he has been involved in much of the organization’s work with an emphasis on Africa.”
Shortly after the Mogadishu war, bin Laden took over Mr Al-Masri’s planning operations against American targets in Africa. A conspiracy of dramatic, ambitious operations that would draw international attention like the 9/11 attacks, they decided to attack two relatively well-protected targets simultaneously in different countries.
On Aug. 7, 1998, just after 10:30 a.m., two trucks loaded with explosives pulled over in front of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The blasts consumed nearby people, blew up the walls of buildings and shattered glass for surrounding blocks.
In 2000, Mr. Al-Masri became one of the nine members of Al Qaeda’s Governing Council and led the organization’s military training.
According to the former Israeli intelligence official, he also continued to monitor operations in Africa and ordered an attack in Mombasa, Kenya in 2002, in which 13 Kenyans and three Israeli tourists were killed.
By 2003, Mr. al-Masri was one of several law leaders who fled Iran, although, despite the group’s hostility, it was out of American reach.
“They believed the United States would find it very difficult to take action against them there,” Mr Schwitzer said. “Because they believe the Iranian regime is negotiating an exchange agreement with the Americans that includes their heads it was too thin.”
Mr. Al-Masri was one of the few high-ranking officials in the organization to escape the American prey of 9/11 criminals and other perpetrators of the attacks. When he and other leaders of the law fled Iran, they were initially detained.
In 2015, Iran announced a deal with al Qaeda in which it released five leaders of the organization, including Mr. al-Masri, in exchange for the kidnapped Iranian diplomat in Yemen.
Traces of Mr Abdullah’s footsteps faded, but according to one of the intelligence officials, he remained in Tehran under the protection of the Revolutionary Guards and later the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. He was allowed to travel abroad and mainly to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria.
Some American analysts say Mr al-Masri’s death would sever ties between one of the last original leaders of the law and current Islamist militants, who grew up after bin Laden’s 2011 death.
“If true, this old school further cuts the link between al Qaeda and modern jihad,” said Nicholas J., former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Rasmussen said. “It simply contributes to the fragmentation and decentralization of the Al Qaeda movement.”
Reporting by Adam Goldton and Adam Goldman and Eric Smith, Fernandez Fasihi of New York and Ronen Bergman of Tel Aviv. Hawaii Plain Beirut and Julian E. Contributed to reporting from Barnes.
