KABUL: Many Afghans expressed shock or doubt on Tuesday (Aug 2) that Al-Qaeda’s chief had been killed in Kabul by a United States drone strike, saying they could not believe Ayman al-Zawahiri had been hiding in their midst.
“It’s just propaganda,” Fahim Shah, 66, a resident of the Afghan capital, told AFP.
Late on Monday, US President Joe Biden announced Zawahiri’s assassination, saying “justice has been delivered” to the Egyptian with a US$25 million bounty on his head.
A senior US official said that the 71-year-old was on the balcony of a three-storey house in the upmarket Sherpur neighbourhood when targeted with two Hellfire missiles shortly after dawn on Sunday.
“We have experienced such propaganda in the past and there was never anything in it,” Shah said.
“In reality, I don’t think he was killed here.”
The Taliban admitted earlier on Tuesday that the US had carried out a drone strike, but gave no details of casualties – and did not name Zawahiri, who was considered a key plotter of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
On Sunday, the interior ministry had denied reports of a drone strike, but Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said on Tuesday that was because an investigation was under way.
Kabul resident Abdul Kabir said that he heard the strike on Sunday morning, but still called on the United States to prove who was killed.
“They should show to the people and to the world that ‘we had hit this man and here is the evidence’,” Kabir said.
“We think they killed somebody else and announced it was the Al-Qaeda chief … there are many other places he could be hiding – in Pakistan, or even in Iraq.”
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