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Libya attack linked to Qaeda

Says US; lack of answers over attack fuels criticism

AFP, Washington
The US intelligence community said that a deadly assault on a US consulate in Libya was a planned attack linked to al-Qaeda, but stressed that "many unanswered questions" remained.
"It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attack, and if extremist group leaders directed their members to participate," Shawn Turner, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a statement Friday.
"We do assess that some of those involved
were linked to groups affiliated with, or sympathetic to al-Qaeda."
The Obama administration has faced mounting criticism as top US officials revise on an almost daily basis their account of what happened in a deadly assault on a US mission in Libya.
At its core are allegations that the State Department, and by implication the Obama administration, failed to protect its diplomats caught up in an hours-long siege of the US consulate in Benghazi.
Some Republican lawmakers have alleged that the Obama administration knew almost immediately afterward that al-Qaeda was involved in the Benghazi attack, which
killed the US ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
Both Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and top US diplomat Hillary Clinton have called the assault a "terrorist attack," with the Pentagon chief also suggesting that it took days for the US government to conclude extremists had launched an orchestrated assault.
According to US media reports, the militants involved in the attacks belonged to a group called Ansar al Sharia. Its members were reportedly in contact with an al-Qaeda offshoot known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb.
The US military's top officer, General Martin Dempsey, also said there had been no warning of a direct threat to the American mission in Benghazi before the attack.
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, on September 16 described it as a "spontaneous attack" that took place on the 11th anniversary of the September 11,2001 terror strikes on the United States.
On Friday a top Republican congressman, Pete King of New York, called for Rice to resign, charging that she misled Americans over the assault by dismissing suggestions that it was a planned terror operation.