Pakistan airstrike kills Qaeda militant

PESHAWAR (AFP) - Pakistani forces killed an Arab Al-Qaeda militant in an air strike on a hideout in Bajaur and are working to identify him, officials said Tuesday. Local intelligence sources identified the man as an Egyptian named Abu Saeed al-Masri, but there was no confirmation from officials in Islamabad, and there are no wanted Al-Qaeda militants by that name. The officials said they were investigating unconfirmed reports that the name was the alias of Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, an Egyptian Al-Qaeda commander based in Afghanistan. Officials earlier said that four foreign militants were killed in Monday night's air strike in the tribal area of Bajaur, where clashes between forces and militants have left 150 people dead in the past week. But a spokesman for Pakistan Tehrik-e-Taliban, which is allied to Al-Qaeda, denied that any foreign insurgents were killed. "I strongly contradict reports that Abu Saeed al-Masri was killed in Bajaur. There are no foreigners," said Maulvi Omar, a spokesman for TTP. The strike comes after a suspected US missile strike in Pakistan killed top Al-Qaeda chemical and biological weapons expert Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, alias Abu Khabab al-Masri, on July 28. Yazid gave a rare interview to a Pakistani television channel last month in which he said that a suicide attacker who bombed the Danish embassy in Pakistan in June came from Saudi Arabia. The bespectacled, bearded Al-Yazid has been named by US officials as Al-Qaeda's commander in Afghanistan and was identified by the 9/11 Commission as the group's chief financial manager. Yazid is said to be a close aide of Osama bin Laden's Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Zawahiri himself escaped a US missile strike in Bajaur in January 2006.

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