Al Qaida claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of a Jewish American man who has gone missing Pakistan, the group’s leader said on Thursday, citing a lifting of Israel’s “siege” of the Gaza Strip as one condition toward securing the man’s release.

In an audio recording issued on Islamist websites, Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri claimed that the militant group had abducted Warren Weinstein, an American development expert, in the Pakistani city of Lahore in August.

Weinstein, about 70 years old, had been working on a project in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas where Pakistani troops have been battling Islamist insurgents for years.

In exchange for Weinstein’s release, an ABC report claimed, Zawahiri requests the lifting of the Israeli “siege” of the Gaza strip, the complete end of “bombings by America and its allies in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Gaza,” as well as the release of all Al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners.

For more, go to Haaretz.com

It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!

We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.

This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions. 

We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.

As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday! 

Don't just read the Forward - invest in it. Make a gift and our board will match it.

Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$129 $180 $360 OTHER AMOUNT