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FACTBOX-Figures set to lead, speak for, al Qaeda

by Reuters
Tuesday, 3 May 2011 17:29 GMT

May 3 (Reuters) - The killing of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden on Monday has left a leadership and publicity vacuum the group will seek to fill with others from its core leadership.

Here are some details of possible candidates to take over:

* AYMAN AL-ZAWAHRI:

-- Zawahri and bin Laden met in the mid-1980s when both were in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar to support mujahideen guerrillas fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

-- Born in 1951 to a prominent Cairo family, Zawahri is the son of a pharmacology professor and grandson of the grand imam of Al Azhar, a highly influential mosque in the Arab world.

-- In 1999, an Egyptian military court sentenced Zawahri to death in absentia. He has also been indicted in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

-- Zawahri has been the brains behind bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, and at times its most public face, repeatedly denouncing the United States and its allies in video messages.

-- Analysts have described Zawahri as al Qaeda's chief organiser and bin Laden's closest mentor.

-- Zawahri has repeatedly called for al Qaeda to seize control of a state, a goal the group has never come close to despite its alliance with Afghanistan's late 1990s Taliban rulers. "If we do not achieve this goal, our actions will be nothing more than small scale harassment," he wrote in a 2001 essay, "Knights Under The Prophet's Banner".

* ABU YAHYA AL-LIBI:

-- Abu Yahya al-Libi is the pseudonym of Mohamed Hassan Qaid, an al Qaeda theologian, expert on new media and director of the group's jurisprudence committee. A Libyan, he has also used the pseudonym Yunus al-Sahrawi.

-- He is described by experts as engaging, media-savvy and ideologically extreme. "Masterful at justifying savage acts of terrorism with esoteric religious arguments, Abu Yahya offers the global al Qaeda movement everything that its old guard cannot," says his biographer, Jarret Brachman.

-- Reportedly born in 1963, Libi attended Sebha University in Libya, majoring in chemistry. In the late 1980s, he travelled to Afghanistan, where he joined the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a faction of Libyans who fought against Soviet troops in Afghanistan and sought to topple Muammar Gaddafi.

-- Libi moved to Mauritania for religious studies, then returned to Afghanistan in 1996 where he saw military action and became a religious voice inside the LIFG. He moved to Karachi to work as a webmaster for the Taliban but was arrested by Pakistani intelligence in 2002 and transferred to Bagram prison in Afghanistan. On July 10, 2005, he escaped with three other al Qaeda suspects, making repeated appearances on al Qaeda videos and writing prolifically. He speaks Arabic, Pashto and Urdu.

-- "Whether he's shown traipsing through valleys, target shooting, reciting poetry or breaking bread with his students, Abu Yahya seems to have made al Qaeda 'cool' for a younger generation," said Brachman.

* SAIF AL-ADEL:

-- Saif al-Adel is a pseudonym for former Egyptian special forces officer Mohamed Mekkawi.

-- Al-Adel was suspected of involvement in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and left the country in 1988 to join the mujahideen fighting Soviet occupation.

-- One of al Qaeda's leading military chiefs, and often called the third-ranking al Qaeda official, Adel helped to plan the bomb attacks against the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar as Salaam in 1998 and set up training camps for the organisation in Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1990s.

-- He spent a number of years under house arrest in Iran but is believed to be back in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area, possibly in Pakistan's North Waziristan region.

-- In 2004, a diary of Adel's was recovered during a raid in Saudi Arabia. His role in the organisation has been as a trainer, military leader and member of bin Laden's security detail. He is on the FBI's most wanted list.

* SAAD BIN LADEN:

-- Saad bin Laden was born in Jeddah in 1979.

-- Like Saif al-Adel, Saad bin Laden was among a group of al Qaeda members and sympathisers who fled to Iran after the 2001 U.S. attack on Afghanistan.

-- Some counter-terrorism experts believe that in April 2002 Saad helped to organise the truck bombing of a synagogue on the southern Tunisian island of Djerba, which killed 20 people.

-- It was reported in July 2009 that he had been killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. This has not been confirmed.

-- Reports emerged in 2009 Iran had quietly freed him in late 2008 and he went to the Afghan-Pakistan border area.

* NASSER AL-WAHAYSHI:

-- Wahayshi, a Yemeni, is the leader of al Qaeda's most dynamic franchise, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

-- Wahayshi and Qasim al-Raymi, who became AQAP's military chief, were among 23 militants who escaped from a Sanaa jail in 2006, enabling al Qaeda to revive its fortunes in Yemen.

-- He helped form AQAP when the Yemeni and Saudi wings of al Qada merged in 2009 into the new group, based in Yemen.

-- They announced the move three years after a security drive halted a 2003-06 armed al Qaeda campaign in Saudi Arabia.

-- Wahayshi, was once the personal secretary in Afghanistan of bin Laden, whose father was born in Yemen.

-- He has urged militants to attack airports and trains in the West, saying they could make bombs from household materials.

* ANWAR AL-AWLAKI:

-- Poorly known in the Arab world, propagandist Awlaki is influential among English language militants due to his prolific output of audio and video talks and fluency in English. He may now take on a more prominent role as a spokesman.

-- Al-Awlaki was born in New Mexico and led prayers at U.S. mosques before returning to Yemen in 2004. He taught at a university before he was arrested and imprisoned in 2006 for suspected links to al Qaeda and involvement in attacks.

-- Awlaki was released in December 2007 after he was said to have repented. But with subsequent postings on the Internet promoting and praising attacks against the United States, al-Awlaki became a focus of U.S. law enforcement agencies.

-- The Obama administration in 2010 authorised the Central Intelligence Agency to capture or kill Awlaki.

-- U.S. investigators have found that he communicated with the army major who went on a shooting spree in 2009 in Texas killing 13 people and that he instructed the Nigerian man who tried to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day of that year. (Sources: Reuters, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, Jamestown Foundation, Jarret Brachman, Combating Terrorism Center, Intelligence online, Der Spiegel, Christian Science Monitor) (Writing by William Maclean; Additional writing and editing by David Cutler, Editorial Reference Unit)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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