Islamabad: An Egyptian al-Qaeda operative described by the United States as the terror network's propaganda chief was killed in a missile strike in Pakistan, security officials said on Saturday.
Abu Jihad al-Masri was among several rebels killed when two missiles fired by a suspected US spy drone hit a truck in the North Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan on Friday night, they said.
The United States has offered a one-million-dollar bounty for the death or capture of al-Masri, who has appeared in an anti-Western video introduced by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's number two.
“The strike was aimed at a vehicle carrying Abu Jihad and two others. The target was successfully hit and all three people were killed," a senior Pakistani security official said.
His death came in one of two separate missile attacks in Pakistan's troubled tribal belt on Friday, the latest in a series of 18 strikes in the past three months that have raised tensions between Washington and Islamabad.
The attacks also come just days before the US presidential election, in which the "war on terror" in Afghanistan and, increasingly, Pakistan has been a key foreign policy issue.
There was no immediate confirmation from the Pakistani military or from US forces deployed in Afghanistan about al-Masri's death.
But some 250 schoolchildren in Wana, the main town in South Waziristan where a second strike on Friday killed 12 militants and injured 30 others, staged a protest march shouting "Death to America" and urging an end to "US aggression".
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