They said Sheikh Abu al Faraj al Masri, who spent years in prison in his native Egypt on charges of plotting with fundamentalist Islamist groups and later left for Afghanistan, died when the vehicle in which he was travelling was hit in rebel-held Idlib in Syria's northwest.
Syria's militant Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly the Jabhat al-Nusra, confirmed the death of the terrorist leader in an air strike.
In one of Masri's last public appearances, he was alongside former Nusra leader Abu Mohamad al-Jolani when the group announced in July it was renaming itself Jabhat Fateh al-Sham to deny Washington and other powers a pretext to attack it.
Last month, Abu Hajer al Homsi, the group's top commander, was killed in an air strike in rural Aleppo province.
Masri, 60, whose real name was Sheikh Ahmad Salamah Mabrouk, had been one of the leading companions of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, according to a terrorists’ source, Independent reported.
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