Ahmed Khadr - Death

Death

On October 2, 2003, Khadr, his son Abdulkareem, al-Jowfi, al-Iraqi, Khalid Habib and Qari Ismail were all staying at a South Waziristan safe house. The following day, after Fajr prayers, Khadr told his son that Pakistani troops had warned a raid was scheduled in the village, and told him to start preparing to leave the village together. However, a Pakistani helicopter team and hundreds of security forces attacked the village before the pair were able to depart, and Abdulkareem lay down in a ditch but was shot in the spine, paralyzing him from the waist down. The 17-year old Khalid Murjan Salim was arrested at the scene, the son of alleged militant Murjan Salim, and extradited to Egypt shortly thereafter.

Initial reports were varied, Pakistan initially reported that Khadr had escaped hours before the raid. Other reports suggested that rumors of his death may have been staged to escape investigators. At one point it was reported that Ahmed had lived, and only his son had been killed. Early reports said that it was a joint American-Pakistani operation, while later reports denied American involvement.

Reports said that 12 "al-Qaeda and Taliban members" were killed in the raid on the "armed encampment", including Hasan Mahsum, and that two al-Qaeda members had been captured. Khadr's name was not included in any of the lists of deceased published in local media, and the captured Abdulkareem was unable to identify his father among the photos of corpses later presented to him, although the Islamic Observation Centre reported that Khadr was "caught" in the battle and died defending Abdulkareem. Three weeks after the attack, Pakistan was still reporting that he had escaped the raid and that they had been conducting house-to-house searches for him, although they spoke of having killed a "high ranking" al-Qaeda member in the attack with a bounty on his head.

In late December, Maha had attorney Hashmat Ali Habib file a petition to the Supreme Court of Pakistan asking for details about whether her husband and son were killed or captured in the operation. Meanwhile, it was believed that the Saudi Sheikh Asadullah stepped up to fill the void left by Khadr's death

It was finally reported in January, three months after the operation, that his DNA had been matched to a body found just outside the doorway and he was indeed killed in the attack, leading his family to request the return of his body for burial in Canada. Arab News reported that he had only been killed in January, following another Pakistani strike in Wana, after successfully escaping the October firefight. In Canadian Federal Court Justice Carolyn Layden-Stevenson's 2005 ruling rejecting Hassan Almrei's application for release, she quoted a confidential CSIS agent named only as P.G. as having testified about Khadr dying in 2004.