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A prominent Egyptian Islamist based in Afghanistan is emerging as a key figure in Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. Ayman al-Zawahri - along with Imad Mughniyeh, the head of overseas operations for the Lebanese group Hezbollah - has been named by Israeli intelligence as the "operational brains" behind the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Dr Zawahri is thought to have played a central role in forging a coalition between the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group and Bin Laden's al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He was a guest at the wedding of Bin Laden's son in Kandahar in January - reportedly making the first speech at the wedding. Following the death of Osama Bin Laden's religious mentor,
the Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam, in a car bomb in Peshawar in 1997, Dr
Zawahri appears to have taken on the role of chief ideologue in the Bin Laden
group. He leads an itinerant life, travelling among the camps in Afghanistan,
delivering sermons and then moving on. Financial control To say that Dr Zawahri is Bin Laden's right-hand man may be
to understate his importance, according to Giles Foden, author of a forthcoming
book on the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Mr Foden says some
analysts believe Dr Zawahri now controls much of al-Qaeda's finance operations
following Bin Laden's assurances to the Taleban that he would no longer take
part in terrorist activities. Dr Zawahri is named in European legislation on
financial sanctions against the Taleban and in documents produced by the US
sanctions body, the US Treasury's office for foreign assets control. Israeli
intelligence says the attacks "were probably financed and got some
logistical support from the Iraqi intelligence service". Distinguished family Born in Egypt in 1951, Ayman al-Zawahri, comes from a middle class family of doctors and scholars. His grandfather, Rabi'a al-Zawahri, was the grand imam of Cairo's Al-Azhar university, a centre of Islamic learning in the Arab world. He was already involved in Egypt's radical Muslim community when he was arrested at the age of 15 for being a member of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood - the Arab world's oldest fundamentalist group. He graduated from Cairo University's medical school in 1974 and obtained a masters degree in surgery four years later. His father, who died in 1995, was a pharmacology professor at the same school. Radical youth Dr Zawahri was tried along with scores of radical Islamists
for their part in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat during a Cairo
military parade. He was convicted and served a three-year sentence for illegal
possession of arms. After his release, he left for Saudi Arabia. Soon afterwards
he headed for Peshawar and later to neighbouring Afghanistan, where he
established a faction of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group. In 1997, the US State Department named him as leader of the Vanguards of Conquest group - a faction of Islamic Jihad thought to have been behind the massacre of foreign tourists in Luxor the same year. Two years later, he was sentenced to death in absentia by an Egyptian court for activities linked to Islamic Jihad. Western targets Dr Zawahri is believed to have lived in Denmark and Switzerland in the early 1990s, sometimes travelling on a false passport. Giles Foden says Dr Zawahri's "freewheeling role across western Europe during the early 1990s raises questions about the security and asylum policies of a number of European nations and about their refusal to act on information provided by the Egyptian Government". Dr Zawahri appeared in a video alongside Bin Laden threatening retaliation against the United States for the detention of the Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Then, in 1998, he was the second of five signatories to Bin Laden's notorious 1998 "fatwa" calling for attacks against US civilians. He is also listed on the US Government's indictment sheet for the 1998 US embassy bombings. He was one of the figures whose satellite telephone conversations were used as proof that Bin Laden was behind the plot. |
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