The killing of an al-Qaeda chemical weapons expert in a missile strike two weeks ago on a Pakistani border village has dealt a heavy blow to the group's ambitions to build weapons of mass destruction (WMD), a former CIA case officer said.
Abu Khabab al-Masri was dubbed by terrorism analysts as al-Qaeda’s “mad scientist.” His most notorious work, recorded on videotape, showed dogs being killed in poison gas experiments in Afghanistan when the Taliban ruled.
“If he is out of the picture, al-Qaeda’s weapons of mass destruction capability has been set back, which would make this one of the more effective strikes in recent years,” said Arthur Keller, an ex-CIA case officer in Pakistan.
Keller led the hunt for al-Masri in 2006.
The US offered a US$5 million bounty for the 55-year old Egyptian, and the CIA had been hunting him for years. Al-Qaeda confirmed his death days after the July 28 attack by unmanned drones on a tribesman’s compound in the village of Azam Warsak in South Waziristan.
Al-Masri, whose real name is Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, got his chemical weapons training in the Egyptian army before defecting to the militant Islamic Jihad group, founded by al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri.
The US government says that since 1999, al-Masri had been distributing manuals for making chemical and biological weapons.
“I believe that al-Qaeda has no shortage of people adept with explosives, and I know that al-Masri promulgated training manuals for poisons,” Keller said, “but I’m not sure how skilled any of Al-Masri’s proteges may be at synthesizing chemical weapons or toxins.”
It’s not easy, he said.
“You need both education and hands-on experience to produce decent-quality chemical weapons or toxins,” Keller said.
Chlorine has been used in bombings by militants in Iraq, but these were locally inspired, a US counterterrorism official said on condition of anonymity, not being authorized to comment publicly on the sensitive issue.
Also, no evidence has surfaced that al-Masri continued the chemical research after moving to Pakistan, although the US government said he was likely carrying out training.
US intelligence agencies tracking al-Masri viewed him as “frightening,” said Brian Glyn Williams, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts, who has just completed research for the US government on weapons of mass destruction.
“From the US government perspective, he was seen as a major threat. His potential to develop primitive weapons of mass destruction was not taken lightly by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” Williams said.
Al-Masri was also suspected of helping to train the suicide bombers who attacked the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, killing 17 US sailors. More recently, he trained militants fighting Western troops in Afghanistan.
His death had already been wrongly reported in a 2006 strike.
This time it was confirmed in an al-Qaeda statement that said he and three other senior al-Qaeda figures were killed, along with some of their children.
Al-Masri is the second senior al-Qaeda leader to die in missile strikes in Pakistan this year. In January, Abu Laith al-Libi, a top strategist for the group in Afghanistan, was killed in North Waziristan.
A senior Taliban militant from Afghanistan, Qari Mohammed Yusuf, said al-Masri had returned to South Waziristan from fighting in Afghanistan’s eastern Paktika Province just hours before he was killed.
Al-Masri had spent 40 days in Paktika, which borders South Waziristan, leading a company of non-Afghans in assaults against Afghan and coalition forces, and had lost several fighters, Yusuf said.
He said the Egyptian took his instructions directly from his countryman al-Zawahri, by e-mail or handwritten letters delivered by messenger.
Yusuf has family ties to al-Qaeda and says his two eldest brothers died fighting with al-Zawahri against Northern Alliance soldiers during Taliban rule. Afghan authorities confirm Yusuf is a senior Taliban from northern Afghanistan — not the Taliban spokesman who goes by the same name.
A report by counterterrorism consultant Dan Darling said al-Masri was a scientist in the Egyptian military chemical weapons program, but turned against his government for making peace with Israel in 1979.
He joined al-Zawahri’s Islamic Jihad group, and when it merged with al-Qaeda, became head of Project al-Zabadi, its WMD program, Darling wrote in a report posted in the Long War Journal, a Web site on terrorism.
Only after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan did evidence of al-Masri’s chemical experiments emerge, at al-Qaeda’s Darunta complex 112km east of Kabul.
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