ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 8 (UPI) -- U.S. officials say they are nearly certain a top al-Qaida terrorist was killed in a Pakistan drone strike, but his death has been mistakenly reported before.
One unnamed senior official told CNN he is "99 percent sure" a June attack got Ilyas Kashmiri, but "the folks that make that determination aren't ready to say so definitively."
Kashmiri is, or was, a ranking al-Qaida figure and ran his own Harakat-ul-Jihad-Islami (Movement for an Islamic Holy War).
In early June, Kashmiri's group said he had been killed by a nighttime drone strike on a convoy in South Waziristan. Pakistani officials said nine people died but did not identify Kashmiri among them.
Kashmiri was a veteran "holy warrior" who fought the Indians in Kashmir and the Soviets in Afghanistan, but later fell out with his Pakistani military patrons and was arrested in a bid to assassinate then-dictator Pervez Musharraf in 2003.
He has been named as a mastermind of the November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, India, and is suspected of sending teams into Europe to plot similar crimes there.
