CIA attack was revenge: Jordan bomber

A Jordanian who blew himself up in Afghanistan, killing seven CIA agents and his Jordanian handler, said in a video broadcast on Saturday the act he was planning was for revenge.

A Jordanian who blew himself up in Afghanistan, killing seven CIA agents and his Jordanian handler, said in a video broadcast on Saturday the act he was planning was for revenge.

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“We tell our emir Baitullah Mehsud we will never forget his blood. It is up to us to avenge him in and outside America,” Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi said about a Taliban leader killed in a US attack in August.

“This is a message to the enemies of the (Muslim) nation —the CIA and Jordanian intelligence services,” said the bearded man in military uniform, identified by Al-Jazeera television as Balawi.

A relative later confirmed to AFP in Jordan that the man shown in the video was indeed Balawi — a Jordanian of Palestinian origin who moved with his family to Jordan after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

In the video Balawi is shown holding a weapon and sitting near another individual wearing a headscarf (identified by monitoring group IntelCenter as head of the Pakistan Taliban Hakimullah Mehsud) with a banner with Koranic verse in the background.

Balawi blew himself up at a US military base in Khost, near the Pakistani border on December 30, killing seven CIA agents and his Jordanian handler, a top intelligence officer and member of the royal family. Jihadist websites have identified Balawi as a double agent who duped Western intelligence services for months.