Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Strike kills top al-Qaida operatives

CIA official says men were behind attacks in Pakistan

By Joby Warrick Washington Post

WASHINGTON – A New Year’s CIA strike in northern Pakistan killed two top al-Qaida terrorists long sought by the United States, including the man believed to be behind September’s deadly suicide bombing at a Marriott hotel in the Pakistani capital, U.S. counterterrorism officials told the Washington Post on Thursday.

Agency officials confirmed in recent days that the Jan. 1 missile strike killed a Kenyan national who used the name Usama al-Kini and was described as al-Qaida’s chief of operations in Pakistan, along with his lieutenant, identified as Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, the sources said. Both men were associated with a string of suicide attacks in Pakistan in recent months and were also on the FBI’s most-wanted list for ties to the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa.

Kini, who had been pursued by U.S. law enforcement agencies on two continents for a decade, was the eighth senior al-Qaida leader killed in clandestine CIA strikes since July, the officials said.

The CIA declined comment on the reported deaths, citing the extreme secrecy of its operations on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border where al-Qaida is believed to be based. However, a U.S. counterterrorism official confirmed that the two died in a CIA strike on a building that was being used for explosives training.

“They died preparing new acts of terror,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity because the agency’s actions are secret.

Details of the attack were sketchy, but counterterrorism officials privy to classified reports said the pair was killed by a 500-pound Hellfire missile fired by a pilotless drone aircraft operated by the CIA. The strike took place near Karikot in South Waziristan.

Kini, whose given name was Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam, had trained terrorists in Africa in the 1990s and served as a central planner of the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, U.S. officials said. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in connection with those attacks and has been on the FBI’s most-wanted list ever since.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he became al-Qaida’s emir of Afghanistan’s Zabul province, and later shifted between Afghanistan, Pakistan and East Africa, planning suicide missions, training operatives and raising money, U.S. officials said.

He became al-Qaida’s operations director for Pakistan in 2007 and was responsible for at least seven suicide attacks, the sources said. These included a failed assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto, the late Pakistani prime minister, in October of that year, and the Sept. 16, 2008, car-bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel. That attack killed 53 people.