Mar 18 (Pen Men at Work): An announcement made by US intelligence said that in an airstrike, an Al Qaeda member who was involved in the attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan in December was killed. This was said after CIA Director Leon Panetta told a newspaper that US and Pakistani attacks against Al Qaeda in Pakistanhave crippled the group and its leadership.

This member of Al Qaeda had played a “key role” in the attack on the CIA base on Dec. 30 that killed seven Americans, according to AFP’s source, a US counterterrorism official. Agence France-Presse reports that the militant killed by a US unmanned aerial drone attack March 8 was Hussein Al-Yemeni, who specialized in bombs and directing suicide operations.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Yemeni, originally from Yemen, was among the top two dozen most-wanted Al Qaeda leaders, and was a “key intermediary” between Al Qaeda and the Haqqani network. He was a conduit for “funds, messages and recruits,” and also had ties to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the branch based in Yemen.

A counterterrorism official called the strike that killed Yemeni a “clean, precise action that shows these killers cannot hide even in relatively built-up places.