One of al-Qaeda's leading operational commanders has been reportedly killed by a U.S. drone strike in Waziristan, according to reports that emerged Saturday.
Ilyas Kashmiri, a notorious 45-year-old one-eyed militant rumoured to have once served as a special forces soldier in Pakistan, had been implicated in relentless string of terror attacks. He was affiliated with a Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami terror group and a faction of militants known as the 313 brigade.
The attacks attributed to HUJI and Mr. Kashmiri include a 2003 plot to kill past Pakistani President Pervez Mussharef, the 2006 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Karachi, and a 16-hour rampage by terrorist gunmen at a naval base in Pakistan just two weeks ago.
Mr. Kashmiri is said to have harboured ambitions to strike targets outside of Pakistan. He isindicted in the United States as an unarrested co-conspirator in a 2009 plot to kill staff at Jyllands Posten — the Danish newspaper that had used cartoons to lampoon the Prophet Mohammed.
A Chicago court now hearing evidence against one of the alleged co-conspirators in the Denmark conspiracy heard just this week that Mr. Kashmiri had aspirations to kill executives at Lockheed Martin – in the mistaken belief that that the defence contractor manufactured the U.S. drones that now routinely kill militants in the outlying regions of Pakistan. (The drones are made by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems.)
The Guardian reports that an HUJI spokesman faxed a Pakistani television station this weekend with the following statement: "We confirm that our Amir (leader) and commander in chief, Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri, along with other companions, was martyred in an American drone strike on 3 June 2011, at 11:15pm."
The group is vowing reprisals against the United States.
The drone strike is said to have occurred at a compound near Wana, Waziristan. Up to nine people were reportedly killed in the drone strike.
Two years ago, there were unconfirmed reports that drones killed two Canadian militants that same area.
This is not the first time that Mr. Kahmiri has reportedly been killed. There were persistent rumours in 2009 that a drone plane bombed him.
Mr. Kashmiri's name has surfaced frequently in the ongoing Chicago trial of Tahawwur Rana, a 50-year-old Pakistani-Canadian accused of using his Chicago immigration consultancy to assist in terrorist schemes.
The bulk of the evidence in that case is being given by David Headley, a white-skinned Pakistani American who has pleaded guilty to being an undercover scout for Pakistani terrorists – including the Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen who killed 160 people in Mumbai in 2008.
"I was unimpressed with his [Kashmiri's] personality but I was impressed with his dedication," Mr. Headley testified late last month, describing how he had met Mr. Kashmiri several times in Waziristan.
He said Mr. Kashmiri was so outraged by the Danish cartoons that he signed off on a plan to have gunmen storm Jyllands Posten, urging the attackers cut the heads off of secretaries and throw them out of windows.
Mr. Headley, now working as an FBI informer to minimize his sentence, offered to help the American government catch Mr. Kashmiri after he himself was caught.
He came up with the idea of presenting Mr. Kashmiri with a ceremonial sword with a concealed beacon, so that U.S. drones could lock in on his coordinates.
Mr. Kashmiri doesn't face any U.S. charges that he participated in the Mumbai Massacre conspiracy. According to evidence presented in Chicago courts, his network of supporters extends beyond Pakistan, to individuals in Britain, Scandinavia, and the United States.
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