Washington: Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is still in Pakistan, a Pentagon official said Wednesday, following the release of a video in which Osama bin Laden’s successor blasted the United States.
“We have no information to indicate that he is anywhere else than in Pakistan,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said.
Zawahiri, a veteran Egyptian militant and long-time Al-Qaeda number two, took over the jihadist network after bin Laden was killed in a clandestine raid by US Navy commandos in Pakistan on May 2.
U.S. intelligence officials are highly skeptical of reports that Al-Qaida’s new leader, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, has fled Pakistan and gone to either Yemen or Somalia. The officials told to an American TV channel that there is no intelligence that al-Zawahiri has left Pakistan.
The officials said it would be extremely risky for Al-Zawahiri to try to move “outside his circle of protection” at this point, and that ever since former al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden’s death, al-Zawahiri spends most of his time “trying to stay alive.”
One senior official, noting the claim that Al-Zawahiri fled Pakistan came from a Pakistani intelligence official, said, “These are the same people who insisted all along that bin Laden was in Afghanistan.”
Earlier Wednesday, a Pakistani intelligence official told NBC News that al-Zawahiri is likely hiding in either Yemen or Somalia. He and his key commanders are believed to have “migrated” from South Asia, the source said.
The Pakistani official, who requested anonymity because he is not allowed to speak to the media, said that “solid intelligence reports based on recent al-Qaida arrests” suggested that Al-Zawahiri had “gone either to Yemen or Somalia.”
Meanwhile, An Afghan Taliban source also said Al-Zawahiri had left the region, US television reported.
CIA director David Petraeus told members of Congress Tuesday that al-Qaida’s recent losses of bin Laden and others have opened “an important window of vulnerability.”
Petraeus predicted that al-Qaida leaders may leave South Asia altogether to escape the CIA, which has quadrupled covert drone strikes against al-Qaida under the Obama administration. He testified at a joint congressional intelligence committee hearing.
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