He is credited with helping to oversee the planning of the 9/11 attacks as well as other al Qaeda atrocities and of trying to acquire biological and nuclear weapons for the group.
'Comfortable upbringing'
His demise in a covert drone strike in Afghanistan is a long way from Zawahiri's comfortable beginnings. A family man as well, Zawahiri married a woman called Azza Nowair and the couple went onto have six children - one son and five daughters.He opened a medical practice but started to become involved in visiting refugee camps along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, according to a profile on Zawahiri by the Washington Post.
It is thought that Zawahiri, described as a thinker rather than a fighter, spent a lot of the 1990s travelling around the world, including to the United States, Bulgaria, Denmark and Sweden, using false passports, in search of new sources of funding.
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