DUBAI: The deputy leader of Al Qaeda, Nasser al-Wahishi, has been killed in a US bombing in Yemen, the group and the White House said on Tuesday, removing the director of a string of attacks against the West and a man once seen as a successor to leader Ayman al-Zawahri.

A close associate of Osama bin Laden in the years leading up to the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, Wahishi, a Yemeni in his late 30s, was named by Zawahri as Al Qaeda’s effective number two in 2013.

With a $10 million price on his head offered by US authorities, Wahishi was also leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and his death potentially weakens the group, widely seen as the militant network’s strongest branch.

He led the group as it plotted foiled bomb attacks against international airliners and claimed responsibility for the deadly shooting at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

Senior AQAP member Khaled Batarfi said in a video statement posted online that Wahishi “passed away in an American strike which targeted him along with two of his mujahideen brothers, may God rest their souls.”

The group had met and appointed its former military chief, Qassim al-Raymi, also a Yemeni, as his replacement, he said.

Some residents of the southeastern Yemeni city of Mukalla reported a suspected drone strike on Friday.

Nasser al-Wahishi, according to Gregory Johnson, author of a book on Yemen, was born in southern Yemen and travelled to Afghanistan for the first time in 1998 to join Al Qaeda.

But eyewitnesses said that last Tuesday, people were gathering on the city’s seaside corniche after evening prayers when an explosion killed three men, spreading their limbs across a street as panicked residents fled.

In an unusual move, Al Qaeda gunmen cordoned off the area and gathered the bodies, residents said, leading them to believe a militant leader was among the dead.

He met bin Laden there and acted as his aide-de-camp until 2001, when the group was scattered after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. He became head of AQAP in 2009.

Published in Dawn, June 17th, 2015

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