Washington, Oct 16: The CIA had paid an Al Qaeda spy to help find a bride for American-born terrorist Anwar al Awlaki in a plot to kill him, a media report said.
Morten Storm, a Danish convert to Islam, was paind $250,000 for the job, the ABC News Monday quoted the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten as saying.
Al Awlaki was linked to a number of terror plots, including the failed effort to blow up a US jetliner over Detroit.
Storm, a purported CIA double agent, provided the newspaper with "proposal" videos and e-mail texts he says al Awlaki exchanged with a 32-year old Croatian woman named Aminah.
"I am 32 years old and am ready for dangerous things," she wrote, according to texts posted by the Danish paper. "I am ready to die for the sake of Allah," she wrote.
The plot failed when she reached Yemen but was told by al Awlaki's aides to abandon her suitcase which had been bugged with tracking devices by the CIA without her knowledge.
Storm told the Danish newspaper, "both of them would be killed in an American drone strike" if the CIA plan had succeeded.
Al Awlaki was killed in a drone strike in September 2011. The CIA declined to comment last week when the claims by the purported spy first surfaced in the Danish paper, according to ABC News.
Storm said he was asked by al Awlaki in 2009 to help him find a European Muslim to be his third wife. He found Aminah through a Facebook page of Awlaki's supporters in 2010.
In her "proposal" video posted on-line by Jyllands-Posten, Aminah, from Zagreb, says, "I feel nervous, this is very awkward for me. I just taped this so you can see how I look."
Al Awlaki wrote to his prospective bride to accept her proposal for marriage, "If you can live in difficult conditions, don't mind loneliness, and can live with restrictions on your communications with others, that is great."
Though the CIA plot failed, the marriage was a success, Storm said. Following al Awlaki's killing last year, Storm said Aminah wrote him to say she wanted to go on a suicide mission to avenge her husband's death but Al Qaeda leaders decided against it.
Aminah now works with the Al Qaeda on-line magazine "Inspire", which frequently featured the musings of her late husband, al Awlaki, the ABC News quoted the report as saying.
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