US News

Evil cleric evades US missile strike

The United States launched a drone strike aimed at killing an American-born radical cleric suspected of orchestrating at least three terror attacks here, it was reported last night.

Cleric Anwar al-Awlaki evaded the missile fired in southern Yemen on Thursday, which killed two al Qaeda militants, the Wall Street Journal.

The strike came four days after a Navy SEALs team killed the world’s most-wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden — leaving Awlaki and his terror organization, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a major threat to the United States.

Awlaki’s been linked to at least three strikes in the United States — the deadly Fort Hood shootings, the Christmas 2009 plot to blow up a Detroit-bound passenger plane and a plan to blow up cargo planes.

In Thursday’s strike, the United States launched two separate attacks within 45 minutes aimed at Awlaki.

The first of three rockets at Awlaki’s truck missed. Two militant brothers were then killed in a second strike, the Journal said.

Meanwhile, al Qaeda warned yesterday bin Laden will be avenged, and that it would continue its global jihad.

Leaving little doubt that the US commando team took out bin Laden early Monday in his safehouse north of Islamabad, al Qaeda admitted he was dead and threatened Americans — and anyone else — who cheered his passing.

“Soon, God willing, their happiness will turn to sadness, their blood will be mingled with their tears,” warns the 11-paragraph Arabic statement from al Qaeda’s “General Command.”

It praised bin Laden as a “martyr” and called for attacks.

“The blood of the holy warrior sheik, Osama bin Laden, God bless him, is too precious to us and to all Muslims to go in vain,” it read. “We will remain, God willing, a curse chasing the Americans and their agents, following them outside and inside their countries.”

No specific threats were made, but the al Qaeda statement also called for Pakistanis to take vengeance on America and US allies.

The statement, dated May 3 but posted yesterday, also opened the way for a successor to take over al Qaeda, possibly his former deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

“Sheik Osama didn’t build an organization to die when he dies,” the statement read.

Al Qaeda has also hinted that bin Laden’s last message — an audio recording made a week before his death — would be released soon.

Also yesterday, US officials said a new revelation that bin Laden had plotted to strike a US railroad proved his network could no longer launch attacks as sophisticated as the 9/11 hijackings.

Documents seized by Navy SEALs from bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout show that in February 2010, al Qaeda considered derailing trains; the documents also contain vague plans to attack water supplies and big cities such as New York.

The terrorists would have simply used trees or concrete blocks to derail a train because the plotters doubted their ability to acquire explosives, sources said.

“If that’s the level of sophistication we’re talking about, I’m going to be out of a job soon,” quipped a senior Homeland Security official.

Counterterror experts said US efforts to destroy al Qaeda training camps and seriously clamp down on the shadowy “hawalah” money-exchange system had crippled bin Laden’s network.

“The concept for using low-tech has been out there for a while because they’ve had such difficulty in carrying out something spectacular like 9/11,” a senior federal counterterror official told The Post.

“They see the value of going low-tech sort of like [the attacks in] Mumbai and even the Times Square bomber, where they still are able to carry out missions.”

Jan Gilhooly, a former senior official in the US Secret Service, said low-tech attacks can be carried out by homegrown terrorist wannabes with no central planning.

In Pakistan, authorities arrested 40 people suspected of having links to bin Laden — the “second phase” of the operation that killed the terror kingpin, Fox News reported.

With Andy Soltis
and Post Wires Services

chuck.bennett@nypost.com