Al Qaeda reward slashed by U.S.

The Bush administration has slashed its reward for the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq from $5 million to $100,000 because it feels he’s lost effectiveness and is no longer worth such a steep price, officials said yesterday.

Over the course of the past year, the government first reduced the bounty for Abu Ayyub al-Masri from $5 million to $1 million and then removed him entirely from the State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program, which pays tipsters for information leading to the death or arrest and conviction of wanted terrorists, the officials said.

Information on al-Masri is now worth only up to $100,000 under a separate and less well-known rewards program run by the Defense Department, which asked that he be taken off the State Department list, they said.

Capt. Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said, “The value of this guy is not what it was, say, at this time last year.”

“Our assessment has led us to believe he’s not as effective a leader on the battlefield … and because of that, he’s just not as valuable to us,” Capt. Graybeal said from the command’s headquarters in Tampa, Fla.

At the State Department, spokesman Sean McCormack said some officials thought removing al-Masri from the list would help their efforts to capture him.

Officials said that besides denigrating al-Masri’s leadership skills, the reduction could lower his stature among potential informants who might otherwise be frightened to turn in a senior operative.

Iraqi officials thought for a while last week they had captured al-Masri in the northern city of Mosul. But U.S. officials later said the captive was someone with a similar name.