The United States President, Joe Biden, on Monday evening, revealed that the leader of the al Qaeda terrorist group, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been killed in a counter-terrorism operation carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Afghanistan capital, Kabul, on Sunday.
Al-Qaeda, a militant Islamist organization, was founded by Osama bin Ladin in the late 1980s.
The al Qaeda leader who was one of the US’ most wanted terrorists, worked alongside the group’s founder, Osama bin Laden, and plotted the September 11, 2001 bombing that killed 2, 977 people.
Biden while speaking at the White House said “Justice has been delivered and this terrorist leader is no more,” adding that he hoped Zawahiri’s death would bring “closure” to families of the 3,000 people killed in the United States on 9/11.
Zawahiri, was an Egyptian surgeon before joing the al Qaeda terrorist group.
Al-Zawahiri, who just turned 71 years old, had taken over as the leader of the group for 11 years after the US killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
In a series of tweets, Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said, “An air strike was carried out on a residential house in Sherpur area of Kabul city on July 31.” According to him, “The nature of the incident was not apparent at first” but the security and intelligence services of the Islamic Emirate investigated the incident and “initial findings determined that the strike was carried out by an American drone”.
Besides the World Trade Centre bombings, al-Zawahiri also masterminded other acts of violence, including the suicide bombing of the USS Cole naval destroyer in Aden in October 2000 which killed 17 US sailors, and the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which 223 people died.
