Bin Laden's Right-Hand Man Imprisoned in Iran

The right-hand man of Osama bin Laden has been arrested and is imprisoned in the Iranian capital of Tehran, a leading Iranian daily claims.

The Farsi-language Hayat-e-Nou reports that Ayman al-Zawahri is in Tehran's Evin prison, where well-known political prisoners are often held.

Hayat-e-Nou, which is run by Hadi Khamenei, an influential legislator and brother of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is among Iran's most reliable newspapers.

Experts on bin Laden's movements had assumed that al-Zawahri, a doctor and bin Laden's spiritual adviser and potential successor as head of the terrorist network al-Qaida, would be with bin Laden in hiding.

Hayat-e-Nou did not mention the whereabouts of bin Laden, who has been the subject of an intensive manhunt since the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Iran's reported detention of a key al-Qaida figure comes amid signs that Tehran is trying to defuse tensions with the United States, which has accused it of trying to destabilise neighbouring Afghanistan by harbouring al-Qaida militants.

CIA Director George Tenet says recently that Tehran had failed "to move decisively against al-Qaida members who have relocated to Iran from Afghanistan".

Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency reported last week that authorities had arrested about 150 people, including a number of Arabs, for questioning over links to al-Qaida or the Taliban, which harboured bin Laden.

Iran shares borders both with Pakistan and Afghanistan, where al-Qaida was based before a US-led military campaign to uproot the network and arrest its leaders.

The Global Spy Magazine - 2001 Edition -Published by: Globalscan International
Ayman Mohamed Rabie al-Zawahri

Name:Ayman Mohamed Rabie al-Zawahri.
Code name: Abu-Mohamed / Abu Fatima.
Date of Birth: June 9, 1951.
Passport Nos:
- Egyptian passport No. 1084010 issued on February 15, 1982.
- French and Swiss passports in the name of Amin Othman.
- Dutch passport No. 513116 in the name of Sami Mahmoud El-Hifnawi.
Activities/Sentences :
Sentenced to three years imprisonment in the case of the outlawed "Jihad" organization, 1981. Accused in the case of the attempt at the life of former Minister of Interior General Zaki Badr. Commander of the military branch of the outlawed "Jihad Organization" in charge of planning terrorist operations. an associat of terrorist Osama Bin Laden. Accused in the case of the outlawed organization of "Tala’ie al-Fat’h" (Vanguards of Conquest).
Cairo surgeon viewed as brains of terror group
September 21, 2001 Posted: 05:45:02 AM PDT
By HAMZA HENDAWI - THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
CAIRO, Egypt -- Osama bin Laden has cash, men and the kind of personality around which cults are built. But it's a surgeon from Cairo who is thought to have the experience and ideological commitment to keep the world's most feared terror group operating.

Ayman al-Zawahri, who hails from a middle class family of doctors and scholars, is second only to bin Laden in the hierarchy of an international alliance set up in 1998 with the aim of killing Americans and destroying U.S. interests wherever they may be.

Bin Laden and al-Zawahri are thought to live in Afghanistan.

Al-Zawahri, 50, is the leader of Jihad, a secretive militant group that is blamed for the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat during a Cairo military parade. The group takes its name from the Arabic for "holy war."

He has been a fixture in Egypt's Muslim militant scene since 1966 when, as a 15-year-old, he was arrested and later freed for his membership in the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world's oldest fundamentalist Muslim group.

"Al-Zawahri's experience is much wider than even bin Laden's," said Dia'a Rashwan, one of Egypt's top experts on militants. "His name came up in virtually every case involving Muslim groups since the 1970s."

A 1974 graduate of Cairo University's medical school, al-Zawahri obtained a master's in surgery four years later. His father, who died in 1995, was a pharmacology professor there.

His grandfather, Rabia'a al-Zawahri, was the grand imam of Cairo's al-Azhar, mainstream Islam's main seat of learning, early in the last century.

Ayman al-Zawahri wrote several books on Islamic movements, the best known of which is "The Bitter Harvest," a critical assessment of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.

"He is the chief ideologue in the bin Laden group," said Rashwan. "Both he and bin Laden have combat experience, but it is Ayman who has the intellectual edge."

Al-Zawahri is the most senior in a brigade of several hundred Egyptians thought to be working under bin Laden's leadership in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden, al-Zawahri and the other Egyptians are among the militant Muslims from the world over who went to Afghanistan during the 1980s to fight invading Russian troops. When the Soviet Red Army pulled out in 1989 and the pro-Moscow government fell three years later, many of the militants stayed on in Afghanistan.

Besides Sadat's slaying, al-Zawahri's Jihad is also blamed for several assassination attempts against other senior Egyptian politicians during a Muslim insurgency in the 1990s, including former Prime Minister Atef Sedki. It also claimed responsibility for the 1996 bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Al-Zawahri was tried along with scores of Jihad members for their part in Sadat's assassination. He was convicted and served a three-year sentence for illegal possession of arms. After his release, he left for Saudi Arabia. In 1999, he was sentenced to death in absentia by an Egyptian court for acts linked to Jihad.

He left Saudi Arabia soon after arriving there, first heading to Peshawar, Pakistan, and later to neighboring Afghanistan.

Al-Zawahri now heads only a faction of Jihad after disagreements with other leaders of the group over his February 1998 pact with bin Laden's al-Qaida group, two Pakistani groups and one from Bangladesh to create the International Front for Fighting Jews and Crusades.

Targeting Americans and U.S. interests as a declared aim was likely to draw unwelcome interest -- and the wrath of a superpower, the Jihad leaders who split with al-Zawahri had argued.

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