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The State Department had offered a $5 million reward for the capture of Jamel Ahmed Mohammed Ali Al-Badawi for helping organize the attack, which killed 17 American sailors on Oct. 12, 2000.
Although the government hadn’t officially confirmed his death Friday afternoon, administration officials said Al-Badawi, an al-Qaueda operative who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, was alone in a vehicle in Yemen's Ma'rib Governorate during Tuesday's airstrike.
There didn’t appear to be any collateral damage, they said.
Suicide bombers pulled up to the Cole in a small boat packed with explosives when it stopped for refueling in Adlen Yemen – in a foreshadowing of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. a year later.
Besides the deaths, 39 sailors were wounded.
Yemeni authorities arrested Al-Badawi for the Cole attack in December 2000, but he escaped in April 2003.
They caught him a year later – and two years after that he escaped again with several other prisoners after digging a tunnel to a nearby mosque using broomsticks and pieces of a broken fan.
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