Mystery around killing of senior Al Qaeda figure in Iran

(KYMA, KECY, CNN)- On the night of August 7, residents of a middle-class neighborhood in northern Tehran heard shooting.

Some of them rushed out to see what had happened.

Slumped in a white Renault was a middle-aged man and a younger woman. Both were dead. At least four shots had been fired at them; another had hit a passing car.

The two assailants had been on a motorbike, according to Iranian news agencies.

One witness told a local journalist: "We were told there was a shooting. We went to the scene and saw they are shot dead. There were two of them."

Within hours semi-official Iranian news agencies were reporting the murders of a Lebanese academic called Habib Dawood with ties to the Lebanese group Hezbollah -- and his daughter, Maryam. There was no explanation of the killings, and no arrests reported.

FARS, later dropped the identities of the victims from its reporting. And there the story rested, until a flurry of activity on obscure social media accounts in mid-October, claiming that the victims were not Lebanese, but rather one of the most important figures in al Qaeda -- Abu Mohammed al-Masri -- and his daughter, Miriam, the widow of Osama bin Laden's son Hamza.

The original reports about the mysterious Dawood seemed suspect because there was no record of a Lebanese academic by the name of Habib Dawood, nor anyone with a similar spelling.

Nor was there any eulogy in Lebanon -- for either him or his daughter. And there was nothing in pro-Hezbollah media in Lebanon to verify the identity of the victims.In mid-October, a Twitter account called "AnbaJassim" -- purportedly belonging to a freelance journalist in the United Arab Emirates posted a screed suggesting it was al-Masri and his daughter who had been killed.