Ringleader al Qaeda slain in Afghanistan

A leading commander of al Qaeda, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, was slain in an action by the Afghan intelligence service NDS.

Qari Saifullah Akhtar was in charge of 30. 000 Pakistani fighters until the end of the reign of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001.

Akhtar has previously been arrested several times in Pakistan, but was released for lack of evidence. He would have been involved in a double suicide bombing in 2007 of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. She survived the attack, but 139 people died. Two months later, during an election rally in Rawalpindi yet Bhutto was killed by a bomb.