Adnan Gulshair el Shukrijumah (4 August 1975-6 December 2014) was a Saudi Arabian-American citizen who was a member of al-Qaeda. He was the head of their operations abroad, planning the 2009 New York subway terror attacks that never happened. In 2014, he was killed in a manhunt in South Waziristan.
Biography[]
Adnan Shukrijumah was born on 4 August 1975 in Saudi Arabia, and in the 1980s he moved to the United States with his family. In the late 1990s, he left for Afghanistan and studied at an al-Qaeda training camp, aided by neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui, and learned how to use explosives at the Kandahar airport. In 2003 he was spotted at a sandwich shop in Tampa, Florida, while called a grave danger to gas stations, fuel trucks, subway systems, trains, and bridges. He was seen meeting with MS-13 street gangs in Honduras, scouting New York City and Panama for possible terrorist attacks, and was believed to be plotting a terror attacks against several US cities (detonating several nuclear bombs at the same time). In 2009 he planned to bomb the New York subways in a terror attack, but the attack was never carried out.
On 6 December 2014, Shukrijumah was killed in a Pakistani manhunt in South Waziristan, a day after al-Qaeda killed American hostage Luke Somers after a failed SEAL Team Six rescue mission to free him in Shabwah Governorate, Yemen.