U.S. urges caution over al-Masri death reports

BAGHDAD - The Interior Ministry is trying to gain custody of what it claimed was the body of Abu Ayyub al-Masri, a senior Iraqi official said Wednesday, amid widespread skepticism over reports that the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq had been killed.

Meanwhile, a police official in Anbar province said al-Masri died when his explosives belt detonated during fighting but security forces could not retrieve the body because it was in a part of the desert controlled by the terror group.

U.S. authorities urged caution about the reports, saying they had not been confirmed and warning that even if the claim were true, the death of the shadowy Egyptian militant likely would not spell the end of the terror movement in Iraq.

“We still don’t know what the status is,” U.S. military spokesman Rear Adm. Mark Fox said Wednesday, adding the U.S. military was not involved in the operation that purportedly killed al-Masri.

“I haven’t seen any reports that we have any bodies, or that we took custody, or that we had any participation there,” he said at a news conference in Baghdad, adding there were no American forces in the area where it was said to have occurred.

Conflicting statements
Reports of al-Masri’s death first emerged Tuesday from the Interior Ministry, which said the al-Qaida leader was gunned down by rivals in his movement Tuesday at a bridge near Lake Tharthar just north of Baghdad, where the U.S. military believes al-Qaida operates training camps.

In a series of conflicting statements, Iraqi officials later said al-Masri’s death had not been confirmed, although they believed they had strong intelligence that it was true.

Senior Interior Ministry official Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal said Wednesday that officials were trying to gain custody of the body, but he declined to comment further.

Iraqi officials have released similar reports about the killing or capture of top insurgent figures, only to acknowledge later that the claims were inaccurate.

An al-Qaida front organization denied that al-Masri, who also is known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajer and has a $1 million bounty on his head, had been killed. The Islamic State of Iraq said in a Web statement that al-Masri was “alive and still fighting the enemy of God.”

But the statement, posted on an extremist Web site, offered no evidence to support the claim. Al-Masri assumed leadership of al-Qaida after his charismatic predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a U.S. airstrike last June.

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