Shadowy lieutenant with blood ties to bin Laden

War on Terrorism: Al-Qa'ida

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Bin Laden deputy killed in air strikes, claim US officials

He was the man in the shadows, the one who never spoke. But Mohammed Atef, the al-Qa'ida leader said yesterday to have been killed in an air strike near Kabul, was as big a fish as the United States could have hoped to catch, short of Osama bin Laden himself.

Not only is Mr Atef believed to have been Mr bin Laden's top military commander, an Egyptian with two decades of experience of guerrilla warfare. He is also widely thought to have been the organisational mastermind behind the 11 September suicide attacks on New York and Washington.

There were ties of blood, too, to America's Public Enemy Number One. In January, Mr Atef's daughter was married to Mr bin Laden's oldest son, Mohammed, in a ceremony captured by al-Jazeera's television cameras and broadcast around the world. If revenge formed any part of the psychology of the United States' "war on terrorism", yesterday brought the first taste of true satisfaction.

Mr Atef is believed to have been with Mr bin Laden's organisation since its beginnings in the early 1990s, and was instrumental in the merger in 1998 between al-Qa'ida and the Egyptian Jihad movement, run by Mr Atef's old comrade-in-arms Ayman al-Zawahiri.

According to intelligence reports leaked to the US media just before the air strikes on Afghanistan began last month, he was identified in communications intercepts picked up in Europe as the man who co-ordinated the highly complex plan to hijack US airliners and slam them into buildings symbolic of America's military and financial power.

When, at the beginning of October, Tony Blair told the Commons that the West had information tying the attacks to "one of bin Laden's closest and most senior associates", he was referring to Mr Atef, the intelligence sources said.

The content of the intercepts has not been made public, and Mr Atef's precise role in the chain of command remains unclear, at least outside the top echelons of government in Washington and London. It is believed, however, that Mr Atef gave orders to a field commander who was in direct contact with the hijackers. Speculation in US intelligence circles has suggested the field commander might have been Mustafah Muhammad Ahmad, also known as Sheikh Saeed, an alleged al-Qa'ida paymaster whose assets were frozen by the US government last month.

Much of the background intelligence on Mr Atef was gathered after the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, for which he was indicted by US prosecutors on charges of murder and conspiracy to murder. A US "wanted" poster, offering a $5m (£3.5m) bounty, described Mr Atef as being between 6ft 4in and 6ft 6in tall. An accompanying photograph showed a swarthy face, dark eyes and a long brown beard.

Mr Atef's face has been captured on film on just two other occasions. One was the Kandahar wedding in January this year. Mr bin Laden took the opportunity to exult in the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, which took place in October 2000. But Mr Atef, the father of the bride, said nothing.

Then, last month, he appeared on the video that was released the day US air strikes on Afghanistan began. Again he was silent, his eyes cast toward the ground while Mr bin Laden, Mr al-Zawahiri and another al-Qa'ida leader, Suleiman Abu Gaith, took turns with a microphone to denounce the United States and rally support for a holy war. The only change was that his beard was showing signs of greying, as was Mr bin Laden's.

Mohammed Atef is believed to have been born in Qena, in upper Egypt, but his birthdate is not known. He worked as a policeman before joining the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group responsible for the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and a long list of other crimes against government officials and civilians.

During the 1980s, Mr Atef travelled to Afghanistan to join the mujahedin forces fighting against the Soviet Union, and it was at this time that he was introduced to Mr bin Laden by Mr al-Zawahiri.

In 1992 and 1993, Mr Atef is believed to have travelled several times to Somalia and may have been involved in attacks on American and United Nations troops attempting to broker peace between the rival warlords there.

More recently, he has been described as the military brains of al-Qa'ida as well as its top recruitment agent – finding footsoldiers throughout the Islamic world and bringing them to Afghanistan for training in al-Qa'ida camps.

Down the years he has been known by many pseudonyms. Among those made public by the US government are Abu Hafs, Sheikh Taysir Abdullah and Abu Khadijah.

Mr Atef's death may not make it any easier to track down the other important al-Qa'ida figures. Despite boasts by the top US military commander General Tommy Franks that his forces were "tightening the noose", some military analysts have doubts about how easy it will be to find Mr bin Laden and his other top lieutenants. There have even been rumours that Mr bin Laden has slipped across Afghanistan's porous southern border into Pakistan.