Feel good story of the day.
(LWJ) — The brother-in-law of Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second in command, is reported to have been killed in Afghanistan earlier this year, according to an Islamist website.
Osama Hassan, whose sister, Omayma, is married to Zawahiri, was killed in Afghanistan sometime over the past several months, according to a martyrdom statement released by the Al Maqrizi Center for Historical Studies. The statement announcing Hassan’s death was published on April 18 at the Al Maqrizi Center’s website.
The Al Maqrizi Center is run by Hani al Sibia, who according to an Egyptian court was one of 14 members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad’s shura majlis, or executive council. Sibia, who has been designated as a terrorist by the United States and the United Nations, maintains close ties to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Zawahiri’s organization which formally merged with al Qaeda in June 2001.
The exact date and location in Afghanistan where Hassan was killed was not disclosed in the martyrdom statement. Nor is it known how Hassan was killed.
According to the statement, Hassan sought asylum in the United Kingdom in 1998 and then traveled to Iran and then Afghanistan in 2001 with Mohammad Khalil Hasan al Hakaymah, who is better known as Abu Jihad al Masri. Hakaymah served as a top leader in the Egyptian Islamic Group, a rival group to Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Both Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Egyptian Islamic Group seek to overthrow the Egyptian government and impose an Islamic state. Hakaymah was the chief of al Qaeda’s intelligence shura prior to his death in a US Predator airstrike in Mir Ali, a terrorist haven in Pakistan’s tribal agency of North Waziristan.