Adnan Gulshair el Shukrijumah

Early years

Shukriumah moved to the United States in the 1980s as a young teenager with his parents. His mother Zuhrah Abdu Ahmed still resides in Florida, while his father died following a career as an imam.

Shukrijumah learned English later in his youth. As a young adult in 1997, he attended "English as a Second Language" classes. The FBI obtained a videotape of Adnan G. El Shukrijumah from the period that shows him giving a presentation exercise to the class, in which he speaks at length on the subject of jump starting a car. U.S. authorities believe that he may have been trained at an Afghan training camp in the late 1990s. He is alleged to have received assistance from American neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui.

Shukrijumah left the United States in May 2001 and flew to Trinidad after receiving his degree in computer engineering. However Mandhai's testimony in court would indicate that he believed he had last seen Shukrijumah two months after his stated departure.

In late 2002, Shukrijumah phoned his parents to tell them that he had found a wife, settled down and had a son, and was now teaching English in Morocco.

2003 worldwide alert In March 2003, his family's Florida home was the subject of an FBI search which yielded no evidence of his location.

Mr. Williams' allegations about McMaster [are] on a par with UFO reports and JFK conspiracy theories...the notion that because there are people on the faculty from Egypt that McMaster is then a haven for terrorism is not only logically offensive, it smacks of racism.

Summer 2004 terror alert On 26 May 2004, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that reports indicated that el Shukrijumah was one of seven al-Qaeda members who were planning terrorist actions for the summer or fall of 2004. The other alleged terrorists listed on that date were Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (who was later captured in Pakistan), Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, and Amer el-Maati, Aafia Siddiqui, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, and Abderraouf Jdey. The first two had been listed as FBI Most Wanted Terrorists since 2001, indicted for their roles in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings. Jdey had already been on the FBI's "Seeking Information" wanted list since inception on 17 January 2002, to which Shukrijumah had also been later added, and the other three as well. American Democrats labeled the warning "suspicious" and said it was held solely to divert attention from President Bush's plummeting poll numbers and to push the failings of the Invasion of Iraq off the front page.

Identified A 2006 Summary of the High Value Terrorist Detainee Program, from the office of the Director of National Intelligence, asserted that Jafar al-Tayyar was identified as el Shukrijumah by waterboarded captive Abu Zubaydah. Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, after also being waterboarded, was shown a photograph of Shukijumah and agreed it was Jafar al-Tayyar. On 8 July 2010, he was put on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list.

External operations council Shukrijumah and two other leaders were part of an "external operations council" that designed and approved terrorism plots and recruits, but his two counterparts were killed in U.S. drone attacks, leaving Shukrijumah as the de facto chief and successor to Mohammed – his former boss. "He would be equated with being chief of operations," FBI special agent Brian LeBlanc told the US news network, adding that investigators believed Shukrijumah was "extremely dangerous."

However, according to the Long War Journal, Shukrijumah was al-Qaeda's operations chief for North America.

Death On 6 December 2014, Pakistani special forces killed Shukrijumah during a targeted operation in the Wana Subdivision of South Waziristan Tribal District during Operation Zarb-e-Azb.