Washington

The US killed al-Qaeda's top leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a drone strike as the 71-year old mastermind of 9/11, the biggest terrorist strike on the USA, was standing in the balcony of a safe house in Kabul, Afghanistan.

He was killed 11 years after Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden was done to death by the US SEALSat Abottavbad, Pakistan  during the Barrack Obama regime .

Zawahiri also had a long history of baiting and threatening India. Last April, he praised the Karnataka college student Muskan for raising Islamic slogans to take on her college mates who were trying to bully her by raising religious slogans during the peak of the Hijab controversy in the state.

US President Joe Biden announced his killing on Monday night from his isolation room where he is staying due to his Covid-19 infection.

He said, “The early-morning strike in the heart of downtown Kabul over the weekend capped a 21-year manhunt for an Egyptian radical who more than anyone other than Bin Laden was deemed responsible for the deadliest foreign attack on the United States in modern times and never gave up targeting Americans.

“Now justice has been delivered and this terrorist leader is no more,” Mr. Biden said in a seven-minute nationally televised address from the White House. “No matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide,” he added, “if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and take you out.”

Zawahiri was believed to be living in Pakistan-Afghanistan region for years.

According to New York Times “Mr. al-Zawahri was long believed to have been living in Pakistan. That he was killed in Kabul is testament to not only the porous border between the two countries but also to Al Qaeda’s decades-long use of facilities, houses, buildings and compounds throughout both countries, a U.S. official said. And unlike the relatively sleepy city of Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Bin Laden was killed by a commando raid in 2011, his successor apparently spent the last weeks of his life right smack in the Afghan capital.

“Earlier this year, American intelligence sources learned that Mr. al-Zawahri’s wife, daughter and grandchildren had relocated to a house in Kabul, a senior administration official told reporters during a conference call on Monday night under White House ground rules requiring anonymity. The official said that the family had exercised longstanding terrorist tradecraft that was intended to prevent anyone from following them.”

US media reports said, American intelligence agencies tracked down al-Zawahri in Kabul earlier this year. Months went into reconfirming his identity. The authorization for his killing came from Biden a week ago.

American forces fired two Hellfire missiles and killed al-Zawahri on a balcony of the house without killing anyone else, including members of his family living there or any nearby civilians, American officials said.

Reports in the US media say the safe house where Zawahiri was stay put belonged to Afghanistan's interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani. Unconfirmed reports said his son was also killed in the stike.

Also Read: ‘Leave Muskan alone’, says father after Al Qaeda video

The Taliban confirmed the US drone strike in Kabul and alleged it amounted to violation of the Doha agreement signed between the group and the US government.