Al-Qaeda chief in the Islamic Maghreb killed
French forces have killed the leader of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Algerian Abdelmalek Droukdel, in northern Mali, France's defence minister said. Droukdel was killed on Thursday near the Algerian border, where the group has bases from which it has carried out attacks and abductions of Westerners in the sub-Saharan Sahel zone, Defence Minister Florence Parly said Friday. "Many close associates" of Droukdel -- who commanded several affiliate jihadist groups across the lawless region -- were also "neutralised", she added. AQIM emerged from a group started in the late 1990s by radical Algerian Islamists, who in 2007 pledged allegiance to Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
Source: Reuters
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