Top Al Qaeeda Commander killed, confirms US President Donald Trump
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WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Thursday confirmed that al Qaeda`s top bomb-maker, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, believed to be the mastermind behind the failed bombing of a US-bound airliner in 2009, has been killed.
Trump said in a White House statement that al-Asiri was killed in 2017 in a United States counter-terrorism operation in Yemen. US officials said last year they were confident al-Asiri had been killed but others had said at the time that the evidence was not conclusive.
Washington had long sought al-Asiri, a Saudi-born militant with al Qaeda`s Yemen branch who was known for his ability to create hard-to-detect bombs, including some implanted in suicide bombers.
Al-Asiri is believed to have masterminded the attempted Christmas Day, 2009, bombing of a passenger jet flying from Amsterdam to Detroit. A Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is serving multiple life sentences in prison for trying to set off the bomb in his underwear.
