WASHINGTON: Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, accused of helping to plan the 1998 bombings against two US embassies in Africa, was assassinated in Iran in August by Israeli agents acting at the behest of the United States. New York The Times reported, citing intelligence officials.
Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, who called himself a nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was shot dead by two men on a motorcycle on the streets of Tehran on August 7, the Times reported on Friday.
The murder of Masri, who was seen as a likely successor to current al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, was kept secret until now, the newspaper said.
A senior Afghan security source told Reuters in October that Masri, who has long been on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, had been killed in the Pasdaran area of Tehran. Reuters had not been able to corroborate that information.
It was unclear what role, if any, the United States played in the killing of the Egyptian-born militant, the Times said. US authorities had been tracking Masri and other al Qaeda operatives in Iran for years, he said.
Al Qaeda has not announced his death, Iranian officials have covered it up, and no government has publicly claimed responsibility, the Times said.
Iran on Saturday denied the report, saying there were no al Qaeda “terrorists” on its territory.
Spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Saeed khatibzadeh He said in a statement that the United States and Israel sometimes “attempt to link Iran to such groups by lying and leaking false information to the media to avoid responsibility for the criminal activities of this group and other terrorist groups in the region.”
The administration of President Donald Trump’s “alarming tactic against Iran has become routine,” Khatibzadeh said.
A US official, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, declined to confirm the details of the Times story or say if there was any US involvement. The White House National Security Council did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Israeli prime minister’s office said it would not comment on the report.
Israel has said in the past that its intelligence services have penetrated Iran in recent years, even saying in 2018 that it had smuggled a suspected archive of Iranian nuclear secrets.
Masri, one of Al Qaeda’s founding leaders, was killed along with his daughter, the Times reported. She was the widow of the son of former al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden orchestrated the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and was killed in an American raid on Pakistan in 2011.
Shiite Iran and Al Qaeda, a militant Sunni Muslim organization, have long been enemies.
Masri had been in Iranian “custody” since 2003, but had been living freely in an exclusive suburb of Tehran since 2015, the Times quoted unidentified US intelligence officials as saying.
US counterterrorism officials believe that Iran, also an enemy of the United States, may have allowed it to live there to conduct operations against US targets, the Times said.
It was not immediately known what impact, if any, Masri’s death had on al Qaeda activities. Although it has lost top leaders in the nearly two decades since the attacks on New York and Washington, it has maintained active affiliates from the Middle East to Afghanistan and West Africa.
The report of al-Masri’s assassination comes weeks after the assassination of two other senior al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan by local security forces.
In October, Afghan security forces killed Abu Muhsin al-Masri, another person on the FBI’s terrorist list, while the Afghan government announced this month that it had killed another senior al Qaeda commander.
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