Obit Lists Family of Bin Laden Aide

The family of Ayman Zawahiri, the top aide to Osama bin Laden, has published a death notice saying Zawahiri’s wife and children have been killed in Afghanistan.

“The family of Dr. Ayman Zawahiri declares to the Muslim nation the death of Azza Anwar Nuwaira and her children,” said the notice, published Friday in the obituary columns of the leading Egyptian newspaper, Al Ahram. Earlier reports said they were killed in a U.S. airstrike, and the notice said they died as martyrs.

On Wednesday, a Muslim activist in London, Hani Sabaei, said Zawahiri’s wife and three daughters were killed by U.S. bombs in Kandahar, the last major Taliban stronghold, Dec. 2. He said several other relatives of Arab members of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network also were killed.

In Washington, an official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the United States had credible reports that members of Zawahiri’s immediate family were killed in an American airstrike.

Zawahiri, 50, is the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a militant group blamed for the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat.

Zawahiri, a doctor trained in Cairo, went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the occupying Soviet troops. In 1998, he merged Jihad with Al Qaeda and other militant groups. The following year, he was condemned to death in absentia in Egypt for activities linked to Jihad.

Zawahiri is considered to be Bin Laden’s chief strategist and the No. 2 person in the Al Qaeda network.

On Thursday, the spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the British government was receiving “persistent reports” that Zawahiri himself died in U.S. strikes, but a U.S. official said Friday that American intelligence had not confirmed that.