US says it has killed Al-Qaeda number two man in Pakistani, but Pakistani officials doubt

A drone operated by the Central Intelligence Agency killed Al-Qaeda’s second-ranking figure in the mountains of Pakistan on Monday, American and Pakistani officials said Saturday, further damaging a terrorism network that appears significantly weakened since the death of its leader Osama bin Laden in May.

An American official said that the drone strike killed Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who in the last year had taken over as Al Qaeda’s top operational planner. Rahman was in frequent contact with Bin Laden in the months before the latter was killed on May 2 by a Navy Seals team, intelligence officials have said.

American officials described Rahman’s death as particularly significant as compared with other high-ranking Qaeda operatives who have been killed, because he was one of a new generation of leaders that the network hoped would assume greater control after Bin Laden’s death.

Thousands of electronic files recovered at Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, revealed that Bin Laden communicated frequently with Rahman. They also showed that Bin Laden relied on Rahman to get messages to other Qaeda leaders and to ensure that Bin Laden’s recorded communications were broadcast widely.

After Bin Laden was killed, Rahman became Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader under Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Bin Laden.

Meanwhile, Pakistani security officials expressed doubt on Sunday over reports from the United States that it had killed the Al-Qaeda second-in-command near the Afghan border.

A senior Pakistani security official in Peshawar told AFP: "We have checked this news report with informers and have worked on it. I doubt the authenticity of this news."
  
Another security official in Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, said he had received no information on the killing. "For me it is just a rumor. Frankly speaking, we are even not aware that a man with this name is working as deputy chief of Al-Qaeda," he added.
  
The officials said the remote, mountainous area, just four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the Afghan border, is inaccessible. "In such cases we rely on information sent from informers. We have not received any type of such a report," the security official in Mir Ali town, North Waziristan, told AFP.
  
An Afghan Taliban commander in Pakistan's northwestern tribal region who is in regular contact with Al-Qaeda described the news report as fake. "It is a fake story. It's not true," he told AFP from an undisclosed location.