The hate-spewing imam who counseled the Fort Hood massacre gunman is believed to have been killed along with senior al Qaeda officials in Yemen airstrikes.
More than 30 terrorists died yesterday when Yemeni jets, backed by US intelligence, blasted al Qaeda lairs in the province of Shabwa before dawn, Yemeni officials said.
Among those believed killed in the raids was New Mexico-born Anwar al Awlaki, an anti-American cleric who was in e-mail contact with Maj. Nidal Hasan more than a year before Hasan, a psychologist, massacred 12 soldiers and one civilian at Fort Hood in Texas.
After the Nov. 5 bloodbath, Awlaki boasted that he was Hasan’s spiritual adviser and that Hasan had asked him if killing US soldiers was permitted by Islamic law.
Awlaki, who is a former imam at mosques in Denver, San Diego and Falls Church, Va., had been on the run in Yemen, where he was giving fiery anti-American sermons and had been placed on the Yemen government’s most-wanted list.
Yemeni officials said he was believed killed at a meeting in the remote valley town of Rafd, where militants were planning attacks on the British Embassy, foreign schools and oil targets in retaliation for the Yemeni government’s fierce crackdown on terrorists. Preparation for the attacks “was in the final stage,” the government said.
A Yemen newspaper said the government also destroyed Awlaki’s home.
Yemen, where Osama bin Laden’s father was born, became a focal point in the war on terror earlier this year when Saudi and Yemeni militants said they were uniting there under the name “al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”
Yemen’s deputy defense minister, Rashad al-Alaimy, told his parliament yesterday that the strikes killed three important members of the group, but he did not identify them.
However, security officials said the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Abu Basir Nasser al-Wahayshi, and his deputy, Saeed al-Shehri, were at the meeting.
Al-Shehri is a former Guantanamo inmate who was transferred to a prison in his native Saudi Arabia in 2007 but escaped and is suspected of recruiting ex-Gitmo captives into al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Alaimy said the strikes were carried out “using intelligence aid from Saudi Arabia and the United States of America in our fight against terrorism.”
Security sources said they were tipped off about the terrorist meeting by villagers.