Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (5 January 1965-) was a Saudi al-Qaeda member who masterminded the 2000 USS Cole bombing in Yemen.
Biography[]
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was born on 5 January 1965 in Saudi Arabia, and he travelled to Afghanistan in the late 1980s to fight against the Soviet Army during the Soviet-Afghan War, and in 1996 he met Osama bin Laden in Jalalabad. al-Nashiri found swearing an oath of loyalty to Bin Laden distasteful, but he was interested in launching terrorist attacks against the United States. In 1997, he returned to Afghanistan to help the Taliban in fighting the Northern Alliance during the Afghan Civil War, and he smuggled anti-tank missiles into Saudi Arabia and secured a false passport for a terrorist who wanted to gain entry into Yemen. However, in 1998 he agreed to join al-Qaeda, and he was given money to attack USS The Sullivans off Yemen as a part of the 2000 millennium attack plots, but the boat that was to be used was overloaded with explosives and sunk before it could strike The Sullivans; the next attempt targeted USS Cole on 12 October 2000, an attack that succeeded in killing 17 US Navy sailors and wounding 39. He became the operational chief in the Arabian Peninsula for al-Qaeda, and he was responsible for the 6 October 2002 bombing of the France-flagged oil tanker Limburg (now known as Maritime Jewel) off the Gulf of Aden, killing one and wounding twelve. In November 2002, he was arrested in the United Arab Emirates and handed over to the United States, who held him in Guantanamo Bay.