SPY EYES

A terrorist convicted for his role in the 1997 Luxor massacre and close confidante of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Al Qaeda leader, was killed by a drone strike in Pakistan.

According to intelligence analysts, Abd el Kader Mahmoud Mohamed el Sayed was once described as Osama bin Laden’s ambassador to Italy and his death was the latest blow to the group’s core leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was believed to have been killed in May or June last year but details of his death were only recently posted online by the movement’s propaganda unit, leading analysts to conclude that Al Qaeda’s remnants were struggling to keep track of who was alive and who was dead.

Rahimullah Yusufzai, one of Pakistan’s leading experts on Al Qaeda, said, “This shows they have a real difficulty co-ordinating. They have scattered, gone underground and don’t seem to be able to maintain contact.”

The CIA’s covert drone programme is under intense scrutiny. John Brennan, Barack Obama’s nominee for the agency’s director, is expected to face tough questioning during his confirmation hearing today (Thursday).

It follows the leak of a Justice Department memo setting out the legal basis for killing American citizens holding senior positions in Al Qaeda. The strikes arouse intense public and political anger in Pakistan. However, the military has apparently never attempted to prevent drones entering its air space and an American diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks suggested that Islamabad had given permission for the attacks.

El-Sayed, who was also known as Abu Saleh al-Masri, was the latest high-profile militant death.
He emerged as a senior figure in Egyptian Islamic Jihad and followed Zawahiri when he merged the movement with Al Qaeda in the 1990s.