Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Al-Qaida terrorist killed in raid in Iraq, U.S. military says

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published April 14, 2006

BAGHDAD - U.S. and Iraqi troops last month killed a wanted terrorist with ties to Osama bin Laden and other senior al-Qaida figures, the U.S. military said Thursday.

Rafid Ibrahim Fattah, also known as Abu Umar al-Kurdi, was killed March 27 near Abu Ghraib, a U.S. statement said.

It identified him as a longtime member of al-Qaida who moved between Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1990s and once served as a security chief for a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. Most recently he was an insurgent cell leader in Baqubah, Iraq, the statement said.

In January 2005, however, the office of then-Prime Minister Ayad Allawi announced the arrest of a man also using the pseudonym Abu Umar al-Kurdi. It identified him as the "most lethal" top lieutenant of al-Qaida's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. However, the Iraqi statement gave his real name as Sami Mohammed Ali Said al-Jaaf.

The 2005 statement said Jaaf was linked to the 2003 bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, which killed the top U.N. envoy in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 21 others.

It was unclear whether the two statements referred to the same person, and efforts to contact U.S. and Iraqi officials were unsuccessful.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - An al-Qaida member wanted by the FBI may have been killed by Pakistani forces in a raid near the Afghan border.

Egyptian Mohsin Musa Matawalli Atwah, 45, may have been killed late Wednesday in the remote North Waziristan village of Naghar Kalai.

Pakistan's information minister, Rashid Ahmed, told the Reuters news agency that Atwah was among the dead, but Pakistani military sources, FBI officials in Washington, and U.S. and Egyptian diplomats in Islamabad did not confirm the statement Thursday.

Information from the Los Angeles Times was used in this report.

[Last modified April 14, 2006, 01:58:12]