An American cleric with ties to the terrorist organization Al Qaeda was killed Friday in Yemen during an air attack, according to the Wall Street Journal. Twitter has mixed feelings about it.
Intelligence officials believed that Anwar al-Awlaki was a senior Al Qaeda leader in the Arabian Peninsula who helped recruit terrorists from around the world, CNN reported.
U.S. officials have linked al-Awlaki to three major terrorists attacks in the last few years: “the Fort Hood, Texas, shootings in which 13 people were killed, the Christmas 2009 plot to blow up a U.S.-bound passenger plane, and a separate plan to blow up a U.S.-bound cargo plane,” reported the Journal.
It is unclear how exactly al-Awlaki was killed, but the Wall Street Journal speculates that it was during a drone attack.
At the time of his death, al-Awlaki was not listed on the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list.
Al-Awlaki was a top trending topic Friday morning. In the last six hours, he has been mentioned more than 10,000 times on Twitter, according to statistics from Topsy, a social media search engine.
While most people on Twitter were merely spreading the word of al-Awlaki’s death, some disagreed with the killing.
“The death of Anwar Al-Awlaki is not to be celebrated,” tweeted Damien S. Lehfeldt (@economyandstate).“He was an American citizen and should have been tried as one. Assassination is wrong.”
“President Obama committed a premeditated illegal murder of a US citizen today,” Pax Dickinson (@paxdickinson) tweeted.
“He was actually a great Islamic scholar and there is no proof to suggest he had anything to do with Al Qaeda. RIP Anwar Al-Awlaki,” tweeted Tomran (@tomran39).
Others, of course, applauded the defense efforts.
“The world is safer with Anwar al-Awlaki dead. Pressure on al-Qaida needs to be kept up,” tweeted former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
“The death of #ANWAR AL-AWLAKI is another victory in the fight against terrorism. He was a dangerous recruiter + inspired attacks on US soil,” tweeted Dutch Ruppersberger (@call_me_dutch).
Al-Awlaki was born “in New Mexico, he preached at a mosque in Northern Virginia until 2002, when he left the U.S. to spend time building a following in the U.K., before returning to Yemen in 2004,” summarized the Wall Street Journal,
While many of the details surrounding al-Awlaki’s death remain uncertain, the masses on Twitter continue to draw their own conclusions.