Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin (1972-18 June 2004) was the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from March to June 2004, succeeding Khaled Ali Hajj.
Biography[]
Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin was born in 1972 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to a middle-class family. He dropped out of high school and was married at the age of nineteen, having fought in the Soviet-Afghan War in 1988. Later, he fought in the Bosnian War with the Bosnian Mujahideen, and he ran guns from Spain to Algeria after the war. Muqrin was trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and fought the Ethiopian Army in the Ogaden region, and in 1995 Ethiopia arrested him for planning to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. He was extradited to Saudi Arabia, where his priosn sentence was commuted after he memorized the whole Quran. However, he became a high-ranking al-Qaeda leader, writing a book on guerrilla warfare and being promoted to leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula after the death of Khaled Ali Hajj in March 2004. He was held responsible for a series of attacks on Westerners in Saudi Arabia, and on 18 June 2004 he was killed in a gun battle with Saudi security forces at a gas station on the same day as the murder of Paul Johnson.