Baghdad, Iraq – British forces shot and killed a leading al-Qaeda terrorist Monday more than a year after he embarrassed the U.S. military by making an unprecedented escape from a maximum-security military prison in Afghanistan, officials said.
Omar al-Farouq was gunned down after he opened fire on British forces during a raid on his home in Basra, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad, said Maj. Charlie Burbridge, a British forces spokesman.
Burbridge said he could not comment on whether it was the same man who allegedly led al-Qaeda’s Southeast Asia operations, citing British policy not allowing him to link an individual to a specific organization.
But a Basra police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons, said it was the same man. The officer said al-Farouq entered Iraq three months ago, was known to be an expert in bombmaking and went by the name Mahmoud Ahmed while in Basra.
Al-Farouq and three other al-Qaeda suspects escaped from Bagram, in central Afghanistan, in July 2005, but the Pentagon waited until November to confirm his escape. The delay upset Indonesia, which had arrested al-Farouq in 2002 and turned him over to the United States.
In Indonesia in November, al-Farouq’s wife said the U.S. government should have put her husband on trial.
“My husband was kidnapped by America, but they never officially told us … for more than three years,” Mira Agustina said then. “I don’t believe that my husband was a terrorist. He is only an ordinary man who cried when he watched movies about violence.”
She had told her two daughters that their father had gone off to America “to work.”
But a top security consultant in Indonesia, Ken Conboy, told The Associated Press last year that al-Farouq joined al-Qaeda in the early 1990s and trained in Afghanistan for three years before unsuccessfully trying to enroll at a flight school in the Philippines so he could commandeer an airplane on a suicide mission.
