CAIRO, Egypt — Al-Qaeda confirmed Sunday the death of a top commander accused of training the suicide bombers who killed 17 U.S. sailors on the USS Cole eight years ago.
Abu Khabab al-Masri, who had a $5 million bounty on his head from the United States, is believed to have been killed in an airstrike apparently launched by the U.S. in Pakistan last week.
An al-Qaeda statement posted on the Internet said al-Masri and three other top figures were killed and warned of vengeance for their deaths. It did not say when, where or how they died but said some of their children were killed along with them.
Pakistani authorities have said they believe al-Masri is one of six people killed in an airstrike July 28 on a compound in South Waziristan, a lawless tribal region near the Afghan border.
The U.S. military has not confirmed it was behind the missile strike. But similar U.S. attacks are periodically launched on militant targets in the tribal border region.
Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are believed to be hiding in the rugged region along the Afghan- Pakistani border.
The U.S. Justice Department has accused al-Masri, an Egyptian militant whose real name is Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, of training terrorists to use poisons and explosives.
He is also believed to have helped run al-Qaeda’s Darunta training camp in eastern Afghanistan until the camp was abandoned amid the 2001 U.S. invasion of the country. There he is thought to have conducted experiments in chemical and biological weapons, testing materials on dogs.
Kamal Shah, a senior official in Pakistan’s Interior Ministry, said the government had “no official confirmation as yet” that al-Masri was dead. The White House declined to comment Sunday.
Terrorism experts downplayed the significance of al- Masri’s death.
“A big name does not mean a big impact on the ground,” said Mustafa Alani, director of national security and terrorism studies at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. “The bottom line is that those people are replaceable. The organization has developed in such a way that it can survive and fill in any gap even if Osama bin Laden was to die.”
