(Previous Incident Code: Ob239 )

Abu Hafs al Shahri (Saudi Ministry of Interior)

A strike on the tenth anniversary of 9-11 killed up to five alleged militants in Hisokhel, North Waziristan. No explicit civilian casualties have been reported relating to this strike, although many of the body counts were not explicitly described as ‘militants’. A local Pakistani official told news agency AFP that a vehicle was destroyed, and that a house was also severely damaged in the attack. GeoTV reported that four drones were involved in the strike, and that their presence afterwards ‘impeded rescue work’. The BBC named one of the dead as a local Haqqani Network commander Hafeezullah who died along with a ‘foreigner’. Four days later a US official reported the death of 33-year old Saudi Abu Hafs al-Shahri, said to be al Qaeda’s operational chief in Pakistan. The Washington Post cited a Pakistan intelligence official based in North Waziristan who ‘suspected, but could not confirm, that Shahri was killed in a drone strike on Sept. 11.’ The New York Times assertively reported that the strike killed al-Shahri. The Long War Journal questioned whether al-Shahri held the role of operations chief.

CNN claimed some weeks later that a German, Mohammad al-Faateh, also died in the strike. ‘Faateh, a suspected al Qaeda commander who had come to Afghanistan in 2006 and made his way to Pakistan in December 2009 … had spent time in Saudi Arabia, was a commander with the militant organization Harkat-ul-Jihad- al- Islami (HuJI),’ according to CNN’s Pakistani intelligence sources. Die Welt claimed he was a 27-year old Berliner, also known as Fatih T.

An internal Pakistani government document listed only one ‘non-local’ killed in this attack, despite media consistently reporting four or five people killed. The document was a secret record of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan and was published by the Bureau in January 2014.