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Top al-Qaeda bombmaker killed
19/01/2006 07:55 - (SA)
Washington - A top al-Qaeda bomb maker with a five million dollar reward on his head was killed in last week's CIA missile strike in Pakistan, said reports on Wednesday.
The reports said Pakistani officials identified him as Midhat Mursi, 52, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri.
United States officials were unable to confirm the report, and appeared to have doubts that he had been definitively identified.
An official said: "It's an open ended question on who was at the site of the attack."
But, Mursi was believed to have been in the immediate vicinity of the strike, which targeted a gathering of senior al-Qaeda figures in the village of Damadola in a tribal area in northwestern Pakistan.
Missile attack
The reports cited Pakistani officials as saying Mursi was one of three known al-Qaeda leaders present at a meeting in the village of Damadola that was targeted in a missile attack late on Thursday or early on Friday.
They said that the Pakistanis said he was on a guest list for the gathering.
Among those who initially were believed to be attending was Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's number two, but his fate was not known and it was unclear if he was ever there.
Pakistani officials said on Tuesday that four or five "foreign terrorists" were killed in the attack, which was carried out late on Thursday or early on Friday by armed CIA-controlled Predator drones.
18 civilians killed
A US counter-terrorism official said: "Obviously a decision along these lines (to launch an attack) is not taken lightly, and you can be assured it was based on very solid information."
Eighteen civilians also were reported killed in the strike, prompting large protests over the weekend in Pakistan.
Pakistani officials said they found 18 freshly dug graves, but two were empty. On Tuesday, the administrator of the Bajur tribal agency said two local militants had removed the bodies of foreign terrorists after the air strike.
Most wanted al-Qaeda leaders
The US official said if Mursi had been killed, "that would be a very significant development".
A five million dollar reward for Mursi's capture was posted on a state department list of wanted al-Qaeda leaders.
The department posting said Mursi operated a training camp in Derunta, Afghanistan, where hundreds of mujahideen were trained in the use of poisons and explosives.
It said that he produced training manuals with recipes for crude chemicals and biological weapons, some of which were recovered by US forces in Afghanistan.
The US official said Mursi also was associated with videotaped poison gas experiments on dogs in Afghanistan.
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