Terror leader had been on the run for months

Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, al-Qaida’s top man in Yemen who was killed in a US air strike, had eluded capture for months by hiding in the desert and remote villages.

He was among six members of al-Qaida, the terror group led by Osama bin Laden, who died yesterday when a Hellfire missile, believed to have been fired from a CIA aircraft, struck their car in the province of Marib, about 100 miles east of the Yemeni capital San’a.

He was one of the main targets of US counter-terrorism efforts because of his alleged role in the 2000 bombing of the US destroyer Cole in Aden, in which 17 American sailors were killed.

Al-Harethi was a long-time figure in the Islamic extremist movement. He was among hundreds of former fighters who returned to Yemen in the 1990s from Afghanistan, where some of them fought alongside bin Laden in a “jihad,” or holy war, against the Soviet army.

Also known as Abu Ali, he was a close associate of bin Laden in Sudan in the early 1990s before the Saudi fugitive millionaire moved in 1996 to Afghanistan.

Yemeni officials say al-Harethi went into hiding in 2001 after being tipped off that he was wanted for questioning by US investigators in the Cole bombing.

Between August and November of last year, al-Harethi spent several months in Hosun al-Jalal, a poor village in Marib – a region of gun-toting tribesmen where government forces venture only with permission of local chiefs.

Al-Harethi lived in the village along with Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal, another al-Qaida suspect who is also wanted for the Cole attack.

Last December, Yemeni special forces, trained by US instructors, moved into Hosun al-Jalal to search for al-Qaida suspects. In the clash that followed, 18 soldiers and six tribesmen were killed, the government said. The two al-Qaida suspects got away.

Yemen’s foreign minister, Abubaker Al-Qirbi, said earlier this year that al-Harethi and al-Ahdal took refuge in the Rub al-Khali or Empty Quarter, the world’s largest sand desert which straddles Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.