In August of 2009, a member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula tried to kill a government official with a bomb shoved up his butt. On Christmas, the terror group sent America a present in the form of explosive underpants. And now this weekend, authorities discovered explosives hidden in printer cartridges, apparently sent by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Turns out, one man is believed to have developed the weapons in all three cases. Meet Ibrahim al-Asiri: al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s ”Q.” How devious is this guy? Well, that butt bomb was carried in the crevasse of al-Airis’s brother, Abdullah.
Al-Asiri is a 28 year old member of AQAP and is listed on Saudi Arabia’s 85 most wanted list. His role as a bombmaker perhaps owes to his experience studying chemistry at the King Saud University’s Faculty of Science, though he didn’t finish his degree. The Saudi government claims al-Asiri belongs to an AQAP cell focused on assassinations and the targeting of oil infrastructure in the Kingdom. It also claims he is adept at martial arts and proficient with a variety of small arms.
Ibrahim’s handiwork first gained public attention when Abdullah, blew himself up — part of an assassination attempt against Saudi Arabia’s deputy Interior Minister Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef. Abdullah allegedly carried the weapon in his anal cavity (though some reports claim it was an underwear bomb). After the attack, AQAP emir Nasir al-Wuhayshi sent a letter of congratulations to al-Asiri’s father. In the note, obtained by Danger Room, al-Wuhayshi writes that Ibrahim was “in good health and among his Ansar brothers” and that it was him “who prepared his brother for martyrdom, as they share the same good qualities.”The Asiri family, however, distanced themselves from their sons’ actions in the wake of Abdullah’s attack on Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef. Their father, Hassan, a 40 year veteran of the Saudi army, offered his “utter condemnation of the criminal act” against Prince Nayef. Their mother, Umm Mohammed, cursed her sons’ associates for bringing them on “this path which brings nothing but strife and torture in this world and the next.”
The Yemen-focused blog Waq al Waq writes that Abdullah’s martyr biography in AQAP’s journal Sada al-Malahim describes Abdullah and Ibrahim’s childhood as pious and without such things as “foolish TV sitcoms” and music. Their mother, however, has painted a different picture of the two al-Qaeda members’ youth to reporters. “They were not religious boys at the time,” Umm Mohammed told the Saudi newspaper al-Watan, “They used to listen to music and had a wide variety of friends, friends not like the ones they had later when they became more religious.”
Umm Mohammed says that it was death of their brother Ali in a car accident that marked Ibrahim and Abdullah’s turn to radicalism. “It was after that that they started swapping video tapes and cassettes on the Mujahideen in Chechnya and Afghanistan, and they became at times distant. Abdullah started to go out a lot with his new friends to camps known as ‘preaching camps.’”
Ibrahim later tried to participate in jihad in Iraq, but was arrested and imprisoned for nine months. In the September 2009 issue of Sada al Malahim, al-Asiri claimed his rough interrogation by Saudi authorities turned him against the Saudi government. He stayed with his family for four months following his release, at which point he and his brother Abdullah fled towards Yemen. The two brothers hid from Saudi security forces at the Yemeni border for days, making it across in August 2006.
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