Benghazi attack 'deliberate, organised and linked' to al-Qaeda

Washington, Sept 29: The assault on the

Consulate in

's Benghazi city was a "deliberate and organised terrorist attack" by groups affiliated with or sympathetic to al-Qaeda, America's top intelligence agency has said.

This is a significant turnaround of the previous version of the attack coming from the Obama Administration which had earlier said that this was a spontaneous protest against an anti-Islam video. The attack resulted in the death of four Americans including the US Ambassador to Libya. "As we learned more about the attack, we revised our initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organised terrorist attack carried out by extremists," Shawn Turner, the spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, said in a statement.

"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. However, we do assess that some of those involved were linked to groups affiliated with or sympathetic to al-Qaeda," he said.

In the unusual statement 17 days after the terrorist attack on US personnel and facilities in Benghazi, Turner said the Intelligence Community launched a comprehensive effort to determine the circumstances surrounding the assault and to identity the perpetrators and reviewed all available intelligence to determine if there might be follow-on attacks against US people or facilities in Libya or elsewhere.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Benghazi Consulate, the statement said, there was information that led the intelligence community to assess that the attack began spontaneously following protests earlier that day at US Embassy in Cairo. "We continue to make progress, but there remains many unanswered questions. As more information becomes available, our analysis will continue to evolve and we will obtain a more complete understanding of the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attack," he added.

PTI