Ayman Al-Zawahiri's 1995 Hit List; EIJ Statement On Oklahoma City Bombing

I've added a new document to the INTELFILES Archive, a May 1995 State Department cable reviewing developments in Egypt. Starting on page 7, there are a few interesting references to Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The first is a news item about Zawahiri issuing a hit list and call for assassinations. The second is a letter released by EIJ "castigating (the US government) and the American people for wrongly assuming that Arabs were responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing."

A State Department source quoted in the cable claimed EIJ had gone from being an active terrorist force to a "composer of intemperate letters to the editor."

Of course, during this period, EIJ's top operatives were already far along in planning the 1998 East African embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. Obviously, the source, "a long-time observer of the Egyptian internal scene," was premature in his pronouncement.

After the issuance of his hit list, Zawahiri's EIJ was linked to the assassination of an Egyptian diplomat (believed to be an intelligence officer) in Geneva, Switzerland, in November 1995 (Jane's Intelligence Review, Oct. 3, 2001), and a June assassination attempt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during a visit to Ethiopia.

Read the document

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