This article in pyjamas media quotes al-qaida admitting that
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In a now mysterious interview published earlier this month in the London-based Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat, a spokesman for the North African branch of al-Qaeda appeared to confirm al-Qaeda involvement in the eastern Libyan rebellion. The North African branch of the terror organization is known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The spokesman was identified as Salah Abu Muhammad.

According to the April 16th article in Al-Hayat, Salah Abu Muhammad claimed that AQIM had set up Islamic emirates in a series of eastern Libyan cities and he identified a certain “Sheikh Abdul-Hakim” as the ruling “emir” in the rebel stronghold of Darnah. The reference is presumably to rebel commander Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi. At the outset of the rebellion in February, Libyan government sources claimed that al-Hasadi had declared an Islamic emirate in Darnah.

“Yes, we have Islamic emirates,” Salah Abu Muhammad was reported to have said, according to a translation prepared by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), “and we are not afraid [to say this], since we are not criminals. We fear Allah alone.” “We have emirates in Derna, Banghazi, Al-Bayda, Maraj and Shahat,” the quotation continues, “all of them glorious and proud, especially the emirate in Derna, whose emir is the honorable sheikh ‘Abd Al-Hakim, who founded an Islamic council in his town together with his brothers in order to rule according to Allah’s law.”


The remarks received little attention in the American or European media. (One exception was a post on the American Thinker blog by Jack Cashill, who cited them in turn from a blog post by the French Middle East correspondent Georges Malbrunot.)

As reported by MEMRI’s Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor, one day after the appearance of the Al-Hayat article, AQIM issued a statement on jihadist websites denying that Salah Abu Muhammad had given an interview to the paper. The AQIM communiqué suggested that the published interview was the result of a plot hatched by Algerian intelligence.

Camille Tawil, the author of the Al-Hayat article, quickly fell into line, posting a laconic English-language retraction on his blog. “It seems I was tricked into doing a false interview with Mr. Salah Abu Mohammed, the AQIM spokesman,” Tawil wrote. “Mr. Salah has issued a denial, and I apologies [sic] to him. The interview is not true.”