A former Broward County college student who slipped out of South Florida just before the 9/11 terrorist attacks and later rose to the top ranks of al-Qaida was killed by Pakistani soldiers on Saturday.

Adnan El Shukrijumah was killed along with two other militants during a Pakistani army assault in a mountainous tribal area known as South Waziristan bordering Afghanistan, the military said in a statement.

Shukrijumah’s death marks the end of a hunt for an elusive figure who came under the scrutiny of the FBI after al-Qaida’s attacks on U.S. soil. He was initially suspected of associating with some of the 9/11 hijackers while attending his late father’s mosque in Miramar as well as Broward Community College.

…Shukrijumah became a leading member and perhaps the head of al-Qaida’s foreign operations subcommittee, a post that makes decisions on plans and recruitment, Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert and author of the book, Inside Al-Qaida: Global Network of Terror, told The Herald in 2011.