Posted on 02/17/2002 6:39:55 AM PST by CRAW
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.
It did not disclose its sources or provide any other information.
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.
OH Really.....I have a bridge I would like to sell you
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.
... 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 ...This explains the sudden reversal of our policy toward Iran. Apparently our masters in Washington knew about this for weeks.
Either he has some unpaid Iranian parking tickets or he's being held in "PROTECTIVE CUSTODY".
Remove the mullahs.........
and that they are very sorry but he is now a "guest" of the state of Iran so it wouldn't be proper to turn him over to the USA.......same old song and dance?
If so, why would they help out Bin Laden & cohorts?
something to do with "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" or "the lesser of 2 evils" since the USA is commonly referred to as "The Great Satan" in Iran and elsewhere, perhaps they are willing to put aside thier differences
Probably due to the old adage, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend".
Maybe because he is (or was) left handed.
Not to mention his 4 wives.
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