Qaeda No.2 away during attack: Pakistan official

ISLAMABAD/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. airstrike in
Pakistan targeted al Qaeda’s second-in-command, U.S. sources
said, but Ayman al-Zawahri was away at the time, according to a
senior Pakistani official on Saturday.

The strike on Friday killed at least 18 people, including
women and children, and three houses were destroyed in a
village near the Afghan border, residents said.

Pakistan condemned the airstrike and would summon the U.S.
ambassador to protest the attack, Information Minister Sheikh
Rashid Ahmed said. He had no information about Zawahri.

CIA-operated unmanned drones were believed to have been
used in the attack on Damadola village, across the border from
Kunar province in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. sources said.

A high-ranking Pakistani official said Zawahri, deputy to
al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was not in the village. The
United States has offered $25 million for either Zawahri or bin
Laden.

“Al-Zawahri was not there at the time,” the Pakistani
official told Reuters.

Pakistani intelligence sources said Zawahri was believed to
have made visits to the Bajaur area, though on Friday he was
not in Damadola, 200 km (125 miles) northwest of Islamabad.

President Pervez Musharraf, addressing officials in the
town of Swabi to the north of Islamabad, said only: “There was
an incident in Bajaur. We are looking into it, who did it —
people from outside have come.”

A military spokesman at U.S. Central Command in Florida
said there had been no official report of an attack in
Pakistan.

Anger has been building in Pakistan over repeated U.S.
intrusions, and on Saturday hundreds of protesters chanted
anti-American slogans at Inayat Killi village, near Damadola.

LOCAL PEOPLE

People from Damadola said no foreigners, only local people,
were present and were killed in Friday’s attack.

“I know all the 18 people killed. There was neither al
Zawahri nor any other Arab among them. Rather they were all
poor people of the area,” Haroon Rashid, the area’s National
Assembly representative, was quoted as saying by the Afghan
Islamic Press, a news agency based in the Pakistani border city
of Peshawar.

Rashid, a member of the hardline Islamic Jamaat-i-Islami
party, said the bombing site was two km (a mile) from his home
and he knew all people of the area.

The incident came days after Pakistan, an important ally in
the U.S.-led war on terrorism, lodged a strong protest with
U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, saying cross-border firing in
the nearby Waziristan area last weekend killed eight people.

On the run since U.S.-led forces toppled Afghanistan’s
Taliban government in 2001 after the September 11 attacks on
U.S. cities, bin Laden and Zawahri are believed to have been
hiding in the border areas under the protection of Pashtun
tribes.

U.S. sources in Washington said the remains of the dead
would be examined to determine whether Zawahri was killed.

Pakistani intelligence sources said they had no knowledge
of any bodies other than those belonging to villagers.

But residents said some people had crossed from Afghanistan
to celebrate this week’s Eid al-Adha festival, and one said he
had seen at least two bodies he believed belonged to outsiders.

Eight women and five children were among those killed.

At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, agents had been
holding out hopes that Zawahri had been eliminated, according
to a former official, in touch with old colleagues.

Analysts say several high profile arrests in Pakistan and
elsewhere mean bin Laden’s and Zawahri’s network has lost much
of its capability to launch attacks.

But while they have been partly overshadowed by al Qaeda’s
leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, they are still regarded
with awe among Islamist militants and their sympathizers.

In a video aired last Friday, Zawahri hailed “Islam’s
victory in Iraq” and said the United States was being defeated
there.

(Additional reporting by Joanne Morrison in Washington and
Zeeshan Haider in Swabi)