'Role of al Qaeda in Benghazi attack not known yet'

The role or involvement of al Qaeda in the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi is not known yet, US President Barack Obama said.

The role or involvement of al Qaeda in the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi is not known yet, US President Barack Obama said.

HT Image

"We don't know yet. And so we're going to continue to investigate this," Obama said on Thursday, during a town hall meeting in Miami, Florida when asked if he has information indicating that it was Iran, or al Qaeda behind organizing the protests.

"We are still doing an investigation, and there are going to be different circumstances in different countries, so I don't want to speak to something until we have all the information."

"What we do know is that the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm US interests," he said.

Obama said his government has insisted on and has received so far full cooperation from countries like Egypt and Libya and Tunisia in not only protecting American diplomatic posts, but also to make sure that they discover who, in fact, is trying to take advantage of this.

"We've decimated al-Qaeda's top leadership in the border regions around Pakistan, but in Yemen, in Libya, in other of these places like Syria – what you see is these elements that don't have the same capacity that a Bin Laden or core al-Qaeda had, but can still cause a lot of damage, and we've got to make sure that we remain vigilant and are focused on preventing them from doing us any harm," Obama stressed.