A warning against the Boston Marathon bomber's execution sentence was issued by al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri. He said there will be the "gravest consequence" if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is killed.
Reuters reported Friday that Al-Zawahri made the threat in a new online video, naming Tsarnaev, 22, specifically. Tsarnaev was sentenced to death last year for the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon, which killed three people and injured more than 260.
"If the U.S. administration kills our brother the hero Dzhokhar Tsarnaev or any Muslim, it ... will bring America's nationals the gravest consequences," Zawahri said, according to Reuters.
WBZ-TV wrote that Tsarnaev is currently serving time at the super-maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colorado, 100 miles south of Denver. Tsarnaev was convicted of committing the bombing with his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed in a shootout with police in the manhunt that followed,
noted The Guardian.
Tsarnaev was convicted on 30 federal charges against him, 17 of which carried the possibility of the death penalty,
wrote the Daily Mail.
Tsarnaev's execution, though, could take decades because of various legal issues, as just three of 74 people sentenced to death in the United States for federal crimes since 1998 have been executed.
Al-Zawahri, 64, took control of al-Qaida after Osama bin Laden was killed in a U.S. raid on his secret compound in Pakistan in 2011. He has evaded American airstrikes since taking over the terrorist organization, but al-Qaida's influence has decreased since.
The Guardian noted that al-Qaida remains active in Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya, but its former Iraqi affiliate grew into the Islamic State as the civil war in Syria expanded.
Al-Zawahri remains one of the most wanted terrorists by the United States with a $20 million bounty placed on his head in 2001.