Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

If the Islambouli Brigades is responsible given that their founder Lt. Khaled Islambouli was the leader of the group of soldiers who assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat during a military parade in Cairo in 1981 and the "Islambouli Brigades of al-Qaida" claimed responsibility for the attempt to assassinate Shaukat Aziz, Pakistan's prime minister-designate and could through Zawahiri be linked with two assassination attempts on President General Pervez Musharraf in December 2003, then one could say that Islambouli is into assassinations. Therefore I would say there is a very good chance they may have been targeting Putin.

If this was an assassination attempt then we are faced with the question of why the airliners exploded before reaching their target. The explosives were set off prematurely because the operation must have been in jeopardy, the airliners could have been intercepted.

I think the Muslims outside Chechnya have more support for this type of reaction than the press reports or that we hear. What we are seeing the press extend is a ‘professional courtesy’ much like the Democrats and Republicans are extending to one another in that the ‘hard’ issues are skirted. To a large degree Bush doesn’t mention Chechnya, Putin backs off Iraq. Both presidents have been keen to present themselves as "war presidents," brave champions of their respective people against rather similar threats from ruthless Islamic terrorists. I believe there is a very strong support from the Muslims outside Chechnya for this type of action.



Reference:

Islambouli’s relations with Ayman El-Zawaheri, head of the Egypt’s Islamist Jihad group and the second most wanted al-Qaeda man, are open secrets.
The linkage between Zawahiri and Islambouli may prove to be more lethal, as some earlier published reports linked the name of Egyptian doctor with the two attempts on President General Pervez Musharraf in December 2003.
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