WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States and Israel tracked and killed a senior al-Qaida operative in Iran earlier this year, in a bold intelligence operation that came as the Trump administration was ramping up pressure on Tehran.
Four current and former U.S. officials say the operative, Abu Mohammed al-Masri, al-Qaida’s No. 2, was killed by assassins in the Iranian capital in August.
Two of the officials, one current and one former, say Israeli agents carried out the operation.
Two others say Israel had been involved in surveillance but could not say definitively who pulled the trigger when al-Masri was gunned down in a Tehran alley on Aug. 7, the anniversary of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
