Top al-Qaeda man killed, says US

27 August 2011 Last updated at 14:15 ET

Abd al-Rahman joined Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan as a teenager

Al-Qaeda’s suspected operations chief, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, has been killed in Pakistan, a senior US official says.

The Libyan militant was killed on 22 August in the volatile Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan, he added.

He would not say how Abd al-Rahman died, but a CIA drone strike was reported in Waziristan on the same day.

Abd al-Rahman was reportedly number two on a list of the five top militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan whom the US most wanted to capture or kill.

In October 2010, Pakistani intelligence officials said they believed Abd al-Rahman had been killed in an air strike by a US drone in North Waziristan.

Explosives expert

Believed to be in his late 30s, he was a close confidant of Osama Bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan in May by US special forces.

Abd al-Rahman joined Bin Laden in Afghanistan as a teenager in the 1980s. He later gained a reputation within al-Qaeda as an explosives expert and Islamic scholar.

He retreated with Bin Laden to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, and became a link to other Islamist militant groups in the Middle East and North Africa.

In June 2006 the US military recovered a letter he wrote to the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who ran al-Qaeda in Iraq, chastising him for alienating rival insurgent groups and attacking Shia Muslims.

Abd al-Rahman is also said to have successfully brokered a formal alliance with the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which changed its name to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

More recently, he was reportedly appointed al-Qaeda’s emissary in Iran.

In June, US officials described him as al-Qaeda’s operations chief, although previous reports said Adnan el Shukrijumah occupied the role.

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