Sanaa, January 05: US-Yemeni imam Anwar al-Awlaqi, who may be linked to the botched attack on a US airliner, is accused by the United States of instigating “terrorism.”
A White House aide has directly accused Awlaqi of having links with the man suspected of shooting dead 13 people at a Texas military base in November, Major Nidal Hasan.
US Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan has also said the US-born imam might have had contact with the man who allegedly attempted to blow up a US airliner on Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
“I think what we are clear about is that Mr. Awlaqi was in touch with Hasan… and there are indications that he had contact, direct contact, with Abdulmutallab,” said Brennan on Sunday.
“Mr. Awlaqi is a problem. He’s clearly a part of Al-Qaeda in (the) Arabian Peninsula. He’s not just a cleric. He is in fact trying to instigate terrorism,” he told CNN.
Awlaqi’s name was already cited in the November 5 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas after US intelligence agencies intercepted emails exchanged between him and Hasan — the army psychiatrist of Palestinian origin.
US President Barack Obama on Saturday accused the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, of arming and training Nigerian suspect Abdulmutallab.
The New York Times previously reported that Abdulmutallab told FBI agents he was connected to the Al-Qaeda affiliate by a Yemeni cleric whom he contacted online.
Security officials in Yemen have confirmed Awlaqi is an Al-Qaeda member but said he was not among its gunmen.
“(He) is not a fighter of Al-Qaeda. He is just a preacher,” said an Awlaqi relative who requested anonymity.
Awlaqi had met two of the bombers on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon building in the United States on September 11, 2001, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, which says they “reportedly respected him as a religious figure and developed a close relationship with him.”
In 2006 he returned to Yemen and was arrested a few months after his arrival for his role in kidnapping the son of a rich Yemeni family and demanding ransom money “to finance Al-Qaeda,” Yemeni security sources said.
He was set free in 2008 after the intervention of Yemeni officials, on condition that he stayed in the capital and reported to police daily.
But several months after his release, he left Sanaa for the eastern region of Shabwa, where he hid in his grandfather’s house, security sources said.
It was not until after the Fort Hood shooting rampage that Yemeni police renewed their search for him.
Awlaqi admitted in an interview that he had contact with Hasan, whom he met nine years ago in Washington.
But he “did not issue a religious edict” authorising the rampage at Fort Hood, said his relative.
The cleric had told The Washington Post he “blessed the act.”
Awlaqi has vanished since an air raid by Yemeni forces on December 24 struck a meeting of Al-Qaeda leaders in Wadi Rafadh, in the province of Shabwa, killing 34.
But he appears to have survived the attack as he was not found at the targeted site, according to Yemeni security officials.
—Agencies