A U.S. military airstrike Saturday targeted an al Qaeda operative accused of leading an attack on an Algerian gas plant in 2013 that left 38 hostages dead, according to the Libyan government and U.S. officials. Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said the military believes the strike was successful—but didn’t definitively say that Mokhtar Belmokhtar had been killed. (The terror leader’s demise has been reported—and retracted—before.) The U.S. charged Belmokhtar last year in connection with the Algeria attack, which killed three Americans.
