Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades

The Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades (Arabic: كتائب أبو حفص المصري‎‎), or Abu Hafs al-Masri Battalions, is a group which claims to be a branch of the Islamic fundamentalist organisation al-Qaida.

The group is named after a former policeman Mohammed Atef, aka Abu Hafs, of Egypt, who was a member of Ayman al-Zawahiri's al-Jihad al-Islami (Islamic Jihad). Al-Masri means "the Egyptian" in Arabic. He became a relative to Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader, after his daughter married bin Laden's son, Mohammed bin Laden. He was killed by U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan in late 2001. He has been adopted as a "martyr" to the fundamentalist cause.

The London-based Arabic language newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi has received letters from this group, in which it has claimed responsibility for:

There is no clearly defined stance on the existence of the Brigades can be discerned on the part of the jihadist radical community. By and large, terrorist organisations have disregarded their statements and avoided including any reference in their own messages that might be construed as representing support for the Brigades or, conversely, a desire to dismiss them as a fraud. This indifference has been shared even by those groups who claimed responsibility for an act of terrorism previously claimed by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades. The group has merited mention by only a handful of radical preachers and even they have arrived at contradictory conclusions . For example, Omar Bakri, leader of the fundamentalist “al-Muhajiroun” group, stated that the claim of responsibility by the Brigades for the Madrid train bombings “was genuine”, whereas Abu Hamzah al-Masri, another of the London-based “preachers of hate”, denied that al-Qaeda (via the Brigades) could be behind “such a criminal act” and defended its position of never referring publicly to the Brigades because “sometimes they [al-Qaeda] leave people to speak whatever they want to speak for, as long as they support them and they try to get the people around them”.

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