Senior Al-Qaeda figure killed in a suspected US air strike in Yemen

A senior Al-Qaeda figure was killed in a suspected US air strike in war-torn Yemen, security and local government sources told AFP on Wednesday.

Hamad bin Hamoud al-Tamimi, a top leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which Washington regards as among the global jihadist network’s most dangerous branches, died in the strike along with a bodyguard, said a security official.

The air strike, targeting a house in the northern province of Marib that al-Tamimi had recently rented, was “apparently American”, the official said.

A Marib government official, also speaking anonymously, confirmed the deaths.

Tamimi, a Saudi also known as Abdel Aziz al-Adnani, headed up AQAP’s leadership council and acted as the group’s “judge”, the sources said.

The “president of the consultative council and judge, known as Abdel Aziz al-Adnani, was killed with a Yemeni bodyguard”, the Marib official said.

AQAP has carried out many terrorist attacks in Yemen in recent years and has also targeted the West.

In 2015, the group claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris and then called for “lone wolf attacks” against Western targets.

In 2020, AQAP claimed the December attack at a US naval base in Pensacola, Florida, though it provided no evidence.

The leader of AQAP, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, was killed in an American air strike in June of 2015. The US eliminated another leader of the group, Qassim al-Raymi, in early 2020.

Last June, AQAP announced the death of one of its commanders, Abu ‘Umayr al-Hadhrami, in a US air strike in Yemen.

Source: israelnationalnews