Just over an hour after sunrise on 31 July, long-time al-Qaeda boss Ayman al-Zawahiri walked out onto the balcony of a downtown Kabul compound – reportedly a favourite post-prayer activity of the veteran Egyptian jihadist.
It would be the last thing he would do.
At 06:18 local time (01:38 GMT), two missiles slammed into the balcony, killing the 71-year-old but leaving his wife and daughter unscathed inside. All the damage from the strike appears to be centred on the balcony.
How UK spies watched from Harrogate as the 9/11 Al-Qaeda chief responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people was executed by a 6-bladed Ninja missile
It was 6.18am on Sunday, more than an hour after dawn prayers, when the Supreme Leader of Al Qaeda appeared on the balcony of his safe house to enjoy a little sunshine and fresh air.
For Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the masterminds of the 9/11 terror attacks, watching mornings unfold in the centre of the Afghan capital from his supposedly secure perch had become one of the few regular pleasures of his life in hiding.
He wasn’t to know that his balcony was anything but safe and that Taliban spies in the pay of the Americans and the British had been monitoring him for months – their knowledge of his whereabouts so detailed that a scale model of his hideaway had sat on a table in President Biden’s White House office for weeks.
And they were watching him again now, not only from Washington but also from a listening station in – of all places – Harrogate, North Yorkshire, after a Western-recruited intelligence source spotted him on the balcony.
