Al-Qaida in Iraq Leader Abu Ayyub Al-masri Believed Dead

The al-Qaida in Iraq leader, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, has been killed in a fight between insurgents north of Baghdad, the interior ministry claimed today.

Brigadier General Abdul Kareem Khalaf told Reuters: "We have definite intelligence reports that al-Masri was killed today."

Another source in the ministry said al-Masri, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, had been killed. Brig Gen Khalaf said Iraqi and US forces were not involved. The US military said it could not confirm the death.

In February the Iraqi government said al-Masri had been wounded by Iraqi troops but escaped in a clash north of Baghdad after soldiers stormed a base near Balad.

Al-Masri, an Egyptian, assumed the leadership of al-Qaida in Iraq after the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a US air strike in June 2006. The US government in 2005 set a $50,000 reward for al-Masri's capture, later raising it to $5m.

Security experts say he became a terrorist in 1982 when he joined Ayman al-Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He probably entered Iraq in 2002, before al-Zarqawi, and may have helped establish the first al-Qaida cell in the Baghdad area.

He had manufactured explosives in Iraq, particularly car and truck bombs, helped foreign fighters move from Syria to Baghdad, and overseen al-Qaida's activities in southern Iraq.

Shortly following al-Zarqawi's death, militant websites identified Abu Hamza al-Muhajir as his successor in Iraq. US military officials said they believed he and al-Masri were one and the same.

Reports of al-Masri's death came amid increasing friction between Sunni al-Qaida militants and other Sunni Arab insurgent groups in Iraq, particularly over al-Qaida's policy of targeting civilians through suicide bombings at mosques and markets.

Iraqi officials have blamed al-Qaida in Iraq for destroying a holy Shia shrine in Samarra a year ago, an act that triggered reprisal killings from Shia death squads and ethnic cleansing in Baghdad.