Posted on 01/18/2006 9:04:55 PM PST by anymouse
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, speaking on condition of anonymity because he's not authorized to speak to journalists, 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.
The U.S. government refuses to discuss the airstrike, which has been condemned by Pakistan.
Provincial authorities say the attack killed 18 residents of the Pashtun village, and they also say they believe sympathizers took the bodies of four or five foreign militants to bury them in the mountains, thereby preventing their identification.
"Efforts are under way to investigate further," said Shah Zaman Khan, director-general of media relations for Pakistan's tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
He said authorities were also looking for two prominent pro-Taliban clerics accused of harboring militants, Maulana Faqir Mohammed and Liaqat Ali, who were allegedly in Damadola and survived the assault.
Intelligence officials say the dead foreigners could be aides of al-Zawahri, who is thought to have sent them in his place to an Islamic holiday dinner to which he'd been invited in Damadola on the night of the attack.
Hours after the attack, an Associated Press reporter visited the village, which consists of a half-dozen widely scattered houses on a hillside about four miles from the Afghan border.
Residents said then that all the dead were local people and no one had taken any bodies away. However, it appeared feasible bodies or wounded could have been spirited away in the darkness after the attack, which took place about 3 a.m.
Islamic custom dictates that bodies be buried as soon as possible, and the reporter saw 13 freshly filled graves with simple headstones and five empty graves alongside them — apparently prepared for more dead. When the reporter returned the next day, the five empty graves were filled in, apparently because no more bodies had been found in the rubble.
The only tidbits of official information that have surfaced since then have come from provincial authorities, and they have yet to give a list of the dead. But Pakistani intelligence officials have said they believe some of those killed were Pakistani militants and that their bodies were also removed from the scene.
A Pakistani army official has told the AP that some bodies were taken away for DNA tests — information at odds with reports from provincial authorities. The federal government has not confirmed the report about DNA tests.
Pakistan maintains it was not given advance word of the airstrike, which was reportedly carried out by unmanned Predator drones flying from Afghanistan.
Thousands have taken to the streets in protest over the attack, denouncing the U.S. and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who ended Pakistan's support of the Taliban regime in late 2001 and has himself been targeted by al-Qaida attacks.
Nevertheless, allegations persist that Pakistan harbors dangerous Islamic militants.
On Wednesday, more than 5,000 people marched through the Afghan border town of Spinboldak, chanting "Death to Pakistan" and "Death to al-Qaida" to protest a suicide attack at a fair this week that killed 21 people.
Afghan officials claim the bomber — the latest in about 25 suicide attackers to strike in Afghanistan in the past four months — trained in Pakistan. Islamabad denies giving sanctuary to terrorists.
You know this is why the local Pakis were so riled up about the attack. They scream the loudist when you score a direct hit on their leadership.
News you don't hear much in the lame stream media.
Here we go :)
Militant? I'll call him a terrorist, thank you.
I hope we can call him a dead terrorist. :)
This good news was held off long enough for the MSM to get out front and use their "bad intelligence, mistake, dead women and childen, etc" talking points (and pictures) broadcast.
Me thinks the MSM will not be as forceful in getting this good news out.
....was last seen with pita bread in his mouth and his head flying across the room.
I'd be passing out some of that $5MM reward money in Iraqi Dinars to the locals for "helping to catch" these terrorist. This would smite many crooks with one stone:
1) Reward behavior of turning in terrorists
2) Boost the Iraqi dinar in Pakistan
3) Enable local rebuilding
All it takes is a little bit of the money to make an huge impact.
greetings from germany - nice shooting uncle sam !
This 60 second explanation from a week or two ago gave Midhat Mursi his props for participating in the high-level, compartmentalized anthrax planning. There is nothing that directly ties him in anthrax planning rather than chemical weapons (such as the documentary evidence to and from Zawahiri). But once someone’s GPS coordinates are associated with a missile firing mechanism, who are they to complain about being given too much credit? The suggestion the missile succeeded seems premature. Perhaps he stepped out to use the loo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8PrTXtHDyI
Nice shot.
Die, terrorist scum, die.
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