A top Tunisian jihadist and associate of late al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by a US airstrike in Libya last month, The New York Times reported Friday. Seifallah Ben Hassine, listed as a "global terrorist" by the US, was killed in mid-June in an airstrike that targeted a top al Qaeda-linked Islamist, the paper said.
Ben Hassine is believed to have co-ordinated a string of assassinations, including the killing of famed Afghan anti-Taliban fighter Ahmad Shah Masood in 2001. Tunisian officials also accused the leader of the banned Ansar al-Sharia group of directing the killings of two secular Tunisian politicians in 2013, the paper reported. He was further suspected of leading an attack on the US embassy in Tunis in September 2012, days after an attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the paper said.