A master al-Qaeda bomb-maker who hid out for years in Yemen while developing hard-to-detect explosives is believed to have been killed last year, a US official told AFP on Tuesday (August 21st).
Ibrahim al-Asiri is thought to have been involved in numerous plots, including one on Christmas Day 2009, when a Nigerian man attempted to set off plastic explosives sewn to his underwear on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.
"We are confident he was killed late last year," the official said on condition of anonymity.
According to a UN team that tracks terror groups in the Middle East, some Security Council members "report that explosives expert Ibrahim al-Asiri may have been killed during the second half of 2017".
"Given al-Asiri's past role in plots against aviation, this would represent a serious blow to operational capability," notes the report, released last week.
The Pentagon said it had no information it could provide.
Al-Asiri, a Saudi, belonged to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. A one-time chemistry student, also known as Abu Saleh, he was on several most-wanted lists and had survived repeated US attempts to kill him.
He specialised in building non-metallic explosives, often using Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, and chemical detonators.
