You know, for someone who purports who runs a site called mosquewatch.com, I would expect you to know this kind of thing. This is al qaeda 101.
Profile: Ayman al-Zawahiri
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1560834.stm
(snip)
Born in Egypt in 1951, Ayman al-Zawahiri, comes from a middle class family of doctors and scholars.
His grandfather, Rabi'a al-Zawahiri, was the grand imam of Cairo's al-Azhar university, a centre of Islamic learning in the Arab world.
He was already involved in Egypt's radical Muslim community when he was arrested at the age of 15 for being a member of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood - the Arab world's oldest fundamentalist group.
He graduated from Cairo University's medical school in 1974 and obtained a masters degree in surgery four years later.
His father, who died in 1995, was a pharmacology professor at the same school.
Zawahiri's wife and children were reportedly killed in a US air strike in Afghanistan in late November or early December 2001.
Radical youth
Zawahiri was tried along with scores of radical Islamists for their part in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat during a Cairo military parade.
He was convicted and served a three-year sentence for illegal possession of arms. After his release, he left for Saudi Arabia.
Soon afterwards he headed for Peshawar and later to neighbouring Afghanistan, where he established a faction of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group.
Zawahiri was in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in 1970s and 1980s, working as a doctor.
In 1997, the US state department named him as leader of the Vanguards of Conquest group - a faction of Islamic Jihad thought to have been behind the massacre of foreign tourists in Luxor the same year.
Two years later, he was sentenced to death in absentia by an Egyptian court for activities linked to Islamic Jihad.
Zawahiri reportedly spent six months in the Russian custody for his alleged extremist activities in the southern republic of Dagestan.
But he was released as his name was not known to Russia's secret services.
Western targets
Zawahiri is believed to have lived in Denmark and Switzerland in the early 1990s, sometimes travelling on a false passport.
Giles Foden says Zawahiri's freewheeling role across western Europe during the early 1990s raises questions about the security and asylum policies of a number of European nations and about their refusal to act on information provided by the Egyptian government.
Zawahiri appeared in a video alongside Bin Laden threatening retaliation against the United States for the detention of the Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Then, in 1998, he was the second of five signatories to Bin Laden's notorious 1998 "fatwa" calling for attacks against US civilians.
He is also listed on the US government's indictment sheet for the 1998 US embassy bombings.
He was one of the figures whose satellite telephone conversations were used as proof that Bin Laden was behind the plot.
***He graduated from Cairo University's medical school in 1974 and obtained a masters degree in surgery four years later. ****
Does it really take a masters degree in surgery to cut off someones head?
Thank you for helping me out!