Zawahiri’s Aide Arrested

A man who has long served as a top deputy to Ayman al Zawahiri, the chief of al Qaeda, was arrested on Monday in Egypt. Thirwat Salah Shehata was found in an apartment in a suburb of Cairo. He is currently being interrogated for his alleged involvement in the death of several Coptic Christians and for organizing militant groups in Egypt and Libya. One of the Libyan groups, Ansar al-Shariah, has been blamed for the Benghazi attacks in 2012, which left the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans dead. Shehata was a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group that assassinated former President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and was sentenced to death for the assassination attempt in the 1990s.