As speculation continues to swirl on the exact details of how Osama bin Laden was tracked down, Great Britain’s The Daily Mail has a report suggesting bin Laden was in effect betrayed by a version of terrorist organization office politics: betrayed by Al Qaeda’s Egypt branch in a power struggle between the group’s Saudi Arabian and Egypt branches so they could get him out of the way:
Osama Bin Laden’s deputy led U.S. troops to the Al Qaeda leader’s hideout so he could take over the terrorist group, it was claimed today.
Egyptian Ayman Al Zawahiri, who has been touted widely as the man who will succeed Bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, turned his back on his terrorist leader following a prolonged power struggle, according to a Saudi newspaper.
The plot to get rid of Bin Laden began when Zawahiri’s faction persuaded bin Laden to leave the protection of the tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Instead, they convinced him to set up home in Abbottabad, where he was finally killed by U.S. Navy SEALS earlier this week, a regional source told the Al-Watan newspaper.
Zawahiri’s Egyptian ally Saif Al Adel is said to have moved to Pakistan last autumn as Al Qaeda’s ‘chief of staff’ after a period of house arrest in Iran.
With his return, Al Qaeda’s Egyptian faction then hatched a plan to dispose of Saudi-born Bin Laden after irresolvable divisions developed between the terrorist group’s top two men.
‘The Egyptian faction of Al Qaeda is defacto running the organisation now and since he was taken ill in 2004 they have been trying to take full control,’ the paper wrote on Thursday.
The courier who led U.S. forces to Bin Laden was a Pakistani national working for Zawahiri, according to the source.
The man is said to have known he was being followed by American troops and to have intentionally led them to their target.
This sounds like another conspiracy theory, this time coming from a source who isn’t an American talk radio host or billionaire.
Go to the link to read it in full and see photos.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.