Precision Targeting Balcony Routine That Brought Down al-Qaida Leader

One of the oldest mistakes in the fugitive's handbook apparently did for Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top al-Qaida leader killed, according to US intelligence, by a drone on Sunday morning: he developed a habit.

- Ed Pilkington

The co-planner of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 had acquired a taste for sitting out on the balcony of his safe house in Sherpur, a well-to-do diplomatic enclave of Kabul. He would step out onto the balcony after morning prayers and watch the sun rise over the Afghan capital.

According to a US official who briefed reporters on Monday, it was such regular behaviour that allowed intelligence agents, presumably CIA, to piece together what they called "a pattern of life” of the target. That in turn allowed them to launch what the White House called a "tailored airstrike" involving two Hellfire missiles fired from a Reaper drone that it claimed struck the balcony, with Zawahiri on it, at 6.18 am on Sunday.

It was the culmination of a decades-long hunt for the Egyptian surgeon who by the time he was killed had a $25m (£20m) bounty on his head. Zawahiri, 71, was held accountable not only for his part in 9/11 as Osama Bin Laden's second-in-command, with its death toll of almost 3,000 people, but also for several of al-Qaida's other most deadly attacks, including the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, which killed 17 US sailors.