Iraq Suspect 'Is Not Al Qaeda Chief'

By Sky News SkyNews - Friday, May 9 10:53 am

Security forces who claimed to have captured the head of al Qaeda in Iraq have the wrong man, a senior US military official has said.

Iraqi officials had announced Abu Ayyub al Masri had been captured during an operation in Mosul.

One senior security source in Mosul said the man seized in that raid was not Masri, an Egyptian also known as Abu Hamza al Muhajir, but an Iraqi.

It is not the first time there has been confusion over the fate of Masri.

Iraq's Interior Ministry said a year ago he had been killed, but soon afterwards Sunni Islamist al Qaeda released an audio tape purportedly from him.

The detention of Masri would have been another blow for al Qaeda, which has been forced to regroup in northern Iraq after a wave of US military assaults in the past year.

Earlier, Interior Ministry spokesman Major-General Abdul-Karim Khalaf said a detained associate of Masri took Iraqi security forces to where the al Qaeda leader was hiding.

After being detained, the man confessed to being the al Qaeda in Iraq leader, he said.

Al Qaeda in Iraq was headed by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al Zarqawi until he was killed in a US air strike in June 2006.

His successor, Masri, was Zarqawi's close associate, and has a US bounty of £2.5m on his head.

US officials blame al Qaeda in Iraq for most big bombings in the country, including an attack on a revered Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 that set off a wave of sectarian killings which nearly tipped Iraq into all-out civil war.

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