Mohammed Atef, the al-Qaeda leader reported yesterday to have been killed during US bombing of Kabul this week, was believed to have been Osama bin Laden's right-hand man.
Atef, also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, left for Afghanistan in the mid-1980s from his native Egypt. He had been a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group that killed President Anwar Sadat in 1981, as retribution for his peace deal with Israel.
Intelligence services identified him as the "military planner" of the September 11th attacks, and the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for which he was on the FBI's "most wanted" list.
Evidence presented during the embassy bombings trial allegedly showed that Atef had kept in touch by satellite phone with the conspirators preparing to set off the bombs.
He was said to have operated from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to have held meetings with the embassy conspirators in Peshawar as an intermediary between them and bin Laden.
The embassy indictment also charged that Atef, then based with bin Laden in Sudan, had encouraged attacks on US troops in Somalia in October 1993, as a result of which, 18 US Rangers were killed while hunting Somali warlord, Mohamed Farah Aideed, and trying to apprehend his aides.
According to US investigators, Atef sat on al-Qaeda's military committee and was also responsible for supervising the training of new members at camps in Afghanistan.
The United States had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.
A former Egyptian policeman, believed to have been born around 1944, his daughter married one of bin Laden's sons earlier this year.
The Pentagon said earlier this week that several senior officials of the Taliban and perhaps al-Qaeda had died in a targeted strike on a house in Kabul on Tuesday.
An official in Washington declined to confirm that Atef had been killed in this raid, but said: "We believe that it is true that he was killed in the US bombing around Kabul." Like his chief, Atef was publicly contemptuous of US leaders and American military power.
"They are only human beings whose power has been exaggerated because of their huge media and the control they exert over the world's media," he told an Arab journalist in 1999.