Osama deputy Zawahri is top al Qaeda strategist

When Osama bin Laden speaks to the world, a bespectacled, avuncular man with grey hair and grey beard is to be found at his side.

But Ayman al-Zawahri is anything but grey: he is the quiet power behind bin Laden, the man most wanted after the al Qaeda chief and his top strategist and planner.

The Egyptian doctor may now be surrounded by Pakistani troops in a rugged border area where troops are fighting a fierce battle with heavy guns and helicopters against suspected al Qaeda militants.

It is months since he has been seen, and then only in an undated videotape released on the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks, when he was seen strolling with bin Laden on a rock-strewn hillside.

But his voice has been heard in several audiotapes, most recently last month when he warned US President George W. Bush to prepare for more attacks and also singled out France.

"Ayman is for bin Laden like the brain to the body," said Montasser al-Zayat, a lawyer in Cairo who once represented Zawahri.

On the FBI's list of its 22 "most wanted terrorists", Zawahri appears second, after bin Laden, befitting his role as the eminence grise, the ideological mastermind behind bin Laden. A similar $25 million reward has been placed on his head.

Dressed in a turban and flowing robes, Zawahri sits beside bin Laden at the Afghan wedding of his leader's son in January 2001 to a daughter of al Qaeda's then-number three, former Egyptian policeman Mohammed Atef.

He sips tea at bin Laden's side in a virulently anti-American video statement by his leader, released days after the September 11 attacks.

He kneels beside bin Laden on floor cushions in a November 2001 interview with a Pakistani reporter in Afghanistan.

Undated video shows Zawahri taking the lead from bin Laden in praise of the September 11 hijackers.

"This great victory that was achieved is only thanks to God," he says.

He is not always in such ebullient mood. Afghan sources described him in a fury at the nonchalance of fighters in the Taliban militia as US bombs rained down from the skies, raging that they were playing badminton behind the front lines while the enemy advanced in November 2001.

He is described as chief organiser of al Qaeda and bin Laden's closest mentor.

The two met in the mid-1980s when both were in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar to support mujahideen guerillas fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

They have worked closely ever since. The alliance was far from being Zawahri's first foray into militancy.

Born in 1951 to a prominent Cairo family, Zawahri was the son of a pharmacology professor and grandson of the grand imam of Al Azhar, one of the most important mosques in the Arab world.

He graduated from Egypt's most prestigious medical school in 1974 and did a second degree in surgery. By now he was already involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, a non-violent group seeking the creation of a single Islamic state.

When the militant Egyptian Islamic Jihad was founded in 1973, he joined. When members posed as soldiers and assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, he was among 301 people arrested.

He went on trial but was cleared of involvement in Sadat's death. He did, however, spend three years in jail for possession of an unlicensed pistol.

On his release, he made his way to Pakistan where he worked with the Red Crescent to treat fighters wounded in the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation, and met bin Laden.

Taking over the leadership of Jihad in 1993, he was a key figure in a campaign in the mid-1990s to set up a purist Islamic state in Egypt, in which more than 1,200 Egyptians died.

In 1999, a military court in Egypt sentenced Zawahri to death in absentia. He has also been indicted in connection with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Days after the bombings, he telephoned a Pakistani reporter. Saying he was speaking on bin Laden's behalf, he denied responsibility but urged Muslims to "continue their jihad against the Americans and Jews".

An hour later, US cruise missiles hit al Qaeda's Afghan training camps. Both bin Laden and Zawahri escaped injury.

He is unlikely to give up without a fight. He wrote a book, titled "Horsemen Under the Prophet's Banner", in his Afghan hideout that was tantamount to a last will.

Al-Zawahri's wife, Azza, and three daughters were reported killed in a bombing strike on the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, stronghold of the Taliban, in early December 2001.