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Qaeda No.2 away during attack: Pakistan official

Reuters | January 15 2006

A U.S. airstrike in Pakistan targeted al Qaeda's number two, 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 regretted the loss of civilian lives, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said, adding "we will not allow such an incident to reoccur."

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, the deputy of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was not in the village. The United States has offered a reward of $25 million for Zawahri or bin Laden.

"Al-Zawahri was not there at the time of the attack," 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 local government officials in Swabi, a town to the north of Islamabad, made an oblique reference to the attack.

"There was an incident in Bajaur. We are looking into it, who did it -- people from outside have come," he said, without pointing a finger directly at the United States.

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.

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 rugged border areas under the protection of Pashtun tribes.

U.S. sources in Washington said it would not be known whether Zawahri was killed until the remains of the dead were examined.

Pakistani intelligence sources said they had no knowledge of the whereabouts of any other 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)

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