The plot thickens…
Although I really should be a) sleeping or b) clearing the decks for next week, clearly I’m doing neither.
Ok, so this small snippet in this article got me curious
In May 2009, police had arrested Abdullah al Masri from Malikyar village. Three days later, diehard militants attacked the police on guard at the house occupied by Al Masri’s two wives and killed three policemen. One of the assailants, a Pakistani identified as Ijaz, son of Sadiq of Malikpura, Abbottabad, was also killed in the attack.
http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/07/osama-lived-in-haripur-before-moving-to-abbottabad-wife.html
Militants attacking to free wives & kids points to someone reasonably high-ranking.
Initial reporting had four foreign women, some of who were thought to be Uzbek, as per Geo New coverage.
Evidently this wasn’t the case, they’re Egyptian. More info reveals
Local police during a raid had recovered Abdullah Al-Misry and his family members – wife Amal Alsyed Mohammad, daughters Wallah, Asma, Safia, Zehra and an infant Ans – from village Malikyar on May 21. Police had reportedly recovered some Kalashnikovs, magazines, hand-grenades, CDs and computers from their possession.
Al-Misry was handed over to an intelligence agency for interrogation while his family members were put under surveillance by deploying police guards at the house where they were living.
Interestingly enough the attackers were wearing stolen police uniforms and killed three officers on duty.
Why is this interesting? Well risking an attack to free the wives is a little unusual. Who were the local fighters who did it? I’m presuming they weren’t just contracted in, but were in the loop, very closely, as they would have had to have gotten the women to safety.
Are the women really all related to al-Masri or was this a shared living arrangement? Whoever it was who was arrested they were senior or the women were related to someone senior.
Who? Well right now I’m currently wondering if this wasn’t Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, a senior AQ figure, but that’s just my speculation. But I’d really like to know who this person was. The report says he’s been handed over to an intelligence agency? Who? And where is he? And where are the wives now? They received a jail sentence and a fine, but would be well and truly out. What do their lawyers know?
More later on this when I hopefully have some access to some software to chart out all the links.
A big thank you to Alex Strick van Linschoten for helping me with the articles. It totally sucks to have no library access to news databases and no software to chart so I appreciate those who are helping me.