2 Al-Qaida Hostages Were Accidentally Killed in U.S. Raid, White House Says

Washington, United States: President Barack Obama on Thursday offered an emotional apology for the accidental killing of two hostages held by al-Qaida, one of them American, in a U.S. government counterterrorism operation in January, saying he takes "full responsibility" for their deaths.

"As president and as commander in chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations," including the one that inadvertently took the lives of the two captives, a grim-faced Obama said in a statement to reporters in the White House briefing room.

"I profoundly regret what happened," he added. "On behalf of the U.S. government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families."

Obama's remarks came shortly after the White House released a statement revealing that intelligence officials had confirmed that Warren Weinstein, an American held by al-Qaida since 2011, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian held since 2012, died during a drone strike. The White House did not explain why it has taken three months to disclose the episode, although it typically takes some weeks after a strike to confirm the identities of casualties.

Two other Americans who belonged to al-Qaida, Ahmed Farouq and Adam Gadahn, were also killed in U.S. operations in the same region, the statement said. Neither had been specifically targeted, and their presence at the sites of the operations was not known at the time, officials said.

Obama said he had ordered the incident declassified because the families of Weinstein and Lo Porto "deserve to know the truth."

"The United States is a democracy, committed to openness in good times and in bad," he said. "It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally, and our fight against terrorists specifically, that mistakes, sometimes deadly mistakes, can occur."

Obama said the operation that killed the two hostages was conducted "fully consistent with the guidelines" for such missions in the region. He said that it was conducted after hundreds of hours of surveillance had convinced U.S. officials that they were targeting an al-Qaida compound where no civilians were present, and that "capturing these terrorists was not possible."

What U.S. officials did not know, he said, was that al-Qaida was "hiding" the captives at the site.

He said a full review was underway to identify any changes that should be made to avoid similar errors in the future.

"We will do our utmost to insure it is not repeated," Obama said.

Even though Obama announced that the two drone strikes had been declassified, there were limits to the White House's transparency about the two operations. Obama did not say that the CIA had carried out the strikes, nor did he say that they occurred in Pakistan.

Under the terms of a secret arrangement brokered in 2004, the CIA was allowed to conduct lethal strikes inside the tribal areas of Pakistan, but neither the U.S. nor the Pakistani government could acknowledge their existence.

One senior U.S. official said that the deaths occurred during two separate strikes in Pakistan in January. One strike killed the two hostages and Farouq. A second CIA drone strike killed Gadahn. It is unclear who else was killed in the two operations.

The pace of drone operations in Pakistan has declined sharply in recent years. But even as the U.S. military withdraws from Afghanistan, the CIA has pushed to keep several of its bases in that country open so that operatives can run missions across the border in order to gather intelligence for drone strikes.

"The president directed that the information being shared today, which was properly classified until now, be declassified and shared with the American people," the White House statement said. "He takes full responsibility for these operations and believes it is important to provide the American people with as much information as possible about our counterterrorism operations, particularly when they take the lives of fellow citizens."

The White House said the operation that killed the two hostages "was lawful and conducted consistent with our counterterrorism policies," but nonetheless the government is conducting a "thorough independent review" to determine what happened and how such casualties could be avoided in the future.

"Many within our government spent years attempting to locate and free Dr. Weinstein and Mr. Lo Porto," the statement said. "The pain of their deaths will remain with us as we rededicate ourselves to adhering to the most exactly standards in doing all we can to protect the American people."

Weinstein, 73, a resident of Rockville, Maryland, was a business development expert working on contract for the U.S. Agency for International Development when he was kidnapped in August 2011 in the Pakistani city of Lahore, just four days before he was scheduled to return to his family in the United States. Al-Qaida released videos of him and news media reports from as recently as last week indicated that he was still assumed to be alive.

"I really don't know why they are holding him," his wife, Elaine Weinstein, told the Voice of America's Deewa service last year. "He was in Pakistan doing development work. He is just an old man, a sick man who was dedicated to doing his job in Pakistan and kept staying there for the benefit of the Pakistani people."

In a column published last August in an Urdu-language Pakistani newspaper and in Newsweek Pakistan, Weinstein said her husband had gone to Pakistan a decade earlier and immersed himself in the culture. "He learned Urdu, dressed in shalwar kameez, and took every opportunity to learn more about Pakistan's history and customs," she wrote.

"My husband has spent his life helping others and devoted all he had to making Pakistan a better place for its people," she continued. "He does not deserve to be held as a bargaining chip."

Lo Porto was a humanitarian aid worker in Pakistan and disappeared in January 2012. Italy's foreign minister said earlier this year that the government was working to secure his release and that of another Italian who has been missing in Syria since 2013.

Lo Porto studied at London Metropolitan University and worked on projects in the Central African Republic and Haiti before traveling to Pakistan to help rebuild an area hit by flooding, according to media reports. Shortly after arriving, he and a German colleague were abducted.

Gadahn, the other U.S.-born al-Qaida figure who was reported killed, was better known publicly. He grew up in Southern California, converted to Islam at age 17 and was said to have left the United States in the late 1990s during a period when he was questioning the family's religious beliefs and the U.S. political system.

He filmed a 2011 video urging attacks by Muslims in the West. "You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card," he told Muslims in the United States. "So what are you waiting for?"