Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, one of the men behind the terror attack of the US embassy in Nairobi and Dark es Salaam 22 years ago was killed in Iran 3 months ago.
The Al Queda’s second-in- command was accused of being one of the masterminds behind the August 8, 1998 bomb blast that killed 224 people including 12 Americans and injured more than 5,000 people making him featured on the F.B.I’s Most Wanted Terrorist List.
New York Times reported that the suspect was killed together with his 27-year old daughter, Maryam, the widow of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza bin Laden and Habib Daoud, a Lebanese historian professor who was a member of Hezbollah, the Iranian- backed militant organization in Lebanon.
Foreign Ministry spokesman, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said in a statement that the said “terrorist” group was formed as a result of failed American policies in the region. He also denied the presence of any Queda members in Iran and warned American media “not to fall for the trap of Hollywood scenarios fed to them by American and Zionist officials.”
Abdullah who went by the name, Abu Muhammed al- Masri, was killed by 2 motorcycle gunmen who fired 5 shots into his car from a pistol fitted with a silencer in Tehran, the capital of Iran on August 7th this year.
The killing of Abdullah, who was one of al Qaeda’s founding leader and likely seen as a successor to the current leader, Ayman al- Zawahiri, was kept secret until now, the news paper said.
Being born in northern Egypt in 1963 and played in the country’s top football league before he joined the Afghan jihadist movement to fight the Soviet invasion of Afhanistan in 1979, he was unable to return to Egypt after the end of Afghan war in 1989 where he eventually joined BIN Laden.
The US had also documented Masri’s travels in Africa, with Laden to Khartoum, Sudan in the early 1990s where he began forming military cells and in Somalia where it is reported to have trained Somali fighters.
