Warren Weinstein: A Look at the American Hostage Killed During Counterterrorism Operation
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Warren Weinstein’s wife Elaine and their daughters Alisa Weinsten and Jennifer Coakley spoke with reporters in 2013 about Warren’s kidnapping. Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images(NEW YORK) — The American held hostage by al Qaeda who was was killed during a U.S. counterterrorism operation was a former Peace Corps official working in Pakistan for community projects.
Dr. Warren Weinstein was taken hostage in 2011 when he was a USAID contract worker in Lahore, Pakistan, who was helping Pakistani families escape poverty, according to President Obama. Gunmen stormed his apartment and took him captive before he was traded to al Qaeda.
Thursday, the White House said Weinstein and another hostage, Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian national, were killed during an American government’s counterterrorism operation this past January. President Obama called him a humanitarian who “devoted his life” to help people across Africa and South Asia.
Weinstein’s wife, Elaine, spoke to ABC’s Good Morning America in December 2013 after seeing a video of her husband.
“I wanted to die right there on the spot,” Weinstein’s wife, Elaine, said at the time about her reaction to the video, “because he has no idea how hard we’ve tried to get him back…and it’s just heartbreaking because he’s asking for help and I can’t give him any.”
In 2012, Weinstein pleaded with President Obama to comply with the terrorists’ demands, saying, “My life is in your hands, Mr. President,” he said. “If you accept the demands, I live. If you don’t accept the demands, then I die.”
“I’ve done a lot of service for my country, and I would hope that my country will now look after me and take care of me and meet the demands of the mujahedeen,” he added.
“I tell the captive soldiers of al Qaeda and the Taliban and our female prisoners held in the prisons of the crusaders and their collaborators, ‘We have not forgotten you and in order to free you we have taken hostage the Jewish American Warren Weinstein,'” al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri said in a 30-minute statement months after Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011.
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