“The others I just don’t know. Maybe they were being targeted,” Awlaki said.
‘A typical kid’
Anwar al-Awlaki’s family speaks out against his son’s death in airstrike
In a separate statement Monday, the Awlaki family said that Abdulrahman “along with some of his tribe’s youth have gone barbecuing under the moonlight. A drone missile hit their congregation killing Abdulrahman and several other teenagers.”
Nasser al-Awlaki said the family decided to issue a statement after reading some U.S. news reports that described Abdulrahman as a militant in his twenties.
The family urged journalists and others to visit a Facebook memorial page for Abdulrahman.
“Look at his pictures, his friends, and his hobbies,” the statement said. “His Facebook page shows a typical kid. A teenager who paid a hefty price for something he never did and never was.”
The pictures on the Facebook page show a smiling kid out and about in the countryside and occasionally hamming it up for the camera. Abdulrahman left the United States with his father in 2002.
Nasser al-Awlaki said Abdulrahman was in the first year of secondary school when he left Sanaa to find his father. He wrote a note to his mother, saying he missed his father and wanted to see him. The teenager traveled to the family’s tribal home in southern Yemen, but Anwar al-Awlaki was killed Sep. 30 in Yemen’s northern Jawf province, about 90 miles east of the capital.
“He went from here without my knowledge,” Nasser al-Awlaki said. “We would not allow him to go if we know because he is a small boy.” He said his grandson, after hearing about his father’s death, had decided to return to Sanaa.
The family also condemned the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, 40, as an “unlawful assassination,” saying that he was an American citizen who had never been formally charged with any crime.
Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico, was one of al-Qaeda’s most prominent and effective propagandists, but U.S. officials said he had also become directly involved in terrorist plots against the United States. After his killing, President Obama described him as chief of “external operations” for AQAP.
U.S. officials had tied him to the attempted bombing of a commercial aircraft on approach to Detroit and the attempted downing of two cargo planes over the United States. They said he inspired an Army officer who is charged with killing 13 people in a November 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., and a Pakistani-American man who tried to set off a car bomb in New York City in May 2010.
The family, in its statement, said, “Anwar was never a ‘militant’ ” nor was he “the head of Al Qaeda external operations.”
The United States has stepped up drone operations in Yemen to counter AQAP, which it fears is exploiting the country’s chaos to plot further attacks. Violent clashes continued Monday in Sanaa between government forces and troops loyal to an army general who broke with President Ali Abdullah Saleh to protect protesters calling for his ouster.
Staff writers James Buck, Greg Jaffe and Jason Ukman and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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