A key jihadist who had escaped from the Americans in Afghanistan. From Reuters:
BRITISH troops in Iraq said they killed one of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s top global lieutenants, who escaped from a US prison in Afghanistan last year.
Omar Faruq was shot dead while resisting arrest during a raid by about 200 British troops in Iraq’s second biggest city, Basra, British military spokesman Major Charlie Burbridge said.
US leaders have described Faruq as the top al-Qaeda operative in South-East Asia. He was caught in Indonesia in 2002 and held at a high-security detention centre at Bagram airbase, north of the Afghani capital Kabul, until his escape last year.
“The individual had been tracked across Iraq and was in hiding in Basra,” Major Burbridge said, calling him a “very, very significant man”.
Faruq, once believed to be the main link between bin Laden’s followers and the Jemaah Islamiah militant group blamed for bombings in Indonesia, was one of four men who escaped from Bagram in July last year.