British forces shot and killed a leading al-Qaeda terrorist more than a year after he embarrassed the US military by making an unprecedented escape from a maximum security military prison in Afghanistan, officials said.
Omar al-Farouq was gunned down on Monday after he opened fire on British forces during a raid on his home in Basra, 547km southeast of Baghdad, British forces spokesman Major Charlie Burbridge said.
Burbridge said he could not comment on whether it was the same man who had led al-Qaeda's Southeast Asia operations.
But a Basra police officer said al-Farouq -- a bomb making expert who went by the name Mahmoud Ahmed -- had entered Iraq three months ago.
Al-Farouq and three other al-Qaeda suspects escaped from Bagram, in central Afghanistan, in July last year, but the Pentagon waited until November to confirm his escape.
The delay upset Indonesia, which had arrested al-Farouq in 2002 and turned him over to the US.
Ken Conboy, a top security consultant in Indonesia, said last year that al-Farouq had joined al-Qaeda in the early 1990s.
Al-Farouk trained in Afghanistan for a period of three years before unsuccessfully trying to enroll at a flight school in the Philippines, with the ultimate objective of commandeering an airplane for a suicide mission.
He later plotted to stage car and truck bombings against US embassies across Southeast Asia.
Those attacks were planned to fall on or near the first anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
But the plan was thwarted and he was captured, Conboy said.
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