The New Al-Qaeda Central - washingtonpost.com

The New Al-Qaeda Central - washingtonpost.com: "After nightfall on Jan. 13, 2006, an unmanned Predator aircraft guided by the CIA fired missiles at two houses in the northwestern Pakistani village of Damadola, a few miles from the Afghan border. The target was a dinner celebrating the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. CIA officials had received intelligence that Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's deputy leader, had been invited to attend. The missiles destroyed the houses and killed more than a dozen people. Zawahiri was not among them, but Pakistani officials soon said the fatalities included several other high-ranking al-Qaeda leaders. Musharraf identified one of the dead as Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, an Egyptian who had overseen al-Qaeda's research into chemical weapons and carried a $5 million U.S. government bounty on his head. Musharraf and other Pakistani officials said those buried in the rubble also included Abu Obaidah al-Masri, the Egyptian chief of the al-Qaeda military wing that plots attacks in the West; Khalid Habib, a field commander for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; and Zawahiri's son-in-law, Abdul Rahman al-Maghribi. U.S. and Pakistani officials now say that none of those al-Qaeda leaders perished in the strike and that only local villagers were killed. The $5 million reward for Umar's capture remains on offer. Masri has continued to rise in the al-Qaeda structure, U.S. officials say, and six months after his supposed death was helping in the failed effort to put bombs aboard airliners flying from Britain."