CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — Fifteen years after allegedly helping al-Qaeda plot the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Abu Anas al-Libi parked his car on a quiet street in Libya’s capital.

Within moments, soldiers from the US Army’s elite Delta Force forced him at gunpoint into a van and sped away. They’d fly him to a naval ship in the Mediterranean Sea before finally taking him to New York to stand trial on charges of helping kill 224 people, including a dozen Americans, and wound more than 4,500.

But al-Libi, who pleaded innocent to the charges against him, wouldn’t live to see his trial start January 12. He died Friday night at a New York hospital of complications stemming from a recent liver surgery, his wife and authorities said yesterday. He was 50.

Al-Libi, once wanted by the FBI with a US$5-million bounty on his head, was chronically ill with hepatitis C when the soldiers seized him. His wife, who asked to be identified as Um Abdullah, told The Associated Press that his experience only worsened his ailments.

“I accuse the American Government of kidnapping, mistreating, and killing an innocent man. He did nothing,” Um Abdullah said.

In a federal court filing yesterday, US Attorney Preet Bharara said al-Libi died after being taken from New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center to a local hospital.

“Despite the care provided at the hospital, his condition deteriorated rapidly and (he) passed away,” Bharara wrote.

Al-Libi, which means “of Libya” in Arabic, was his nom de guerre. Also known as Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, US prosecutors in 2000 described al-Libi as sitting on a council that approved terrorist operations for al-Qaeda, which would become infamous worldwide a year later after the September 11 terror attacks.

Before that, al-Qaeda’s August 7, 1998, truck bombings at the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were its deadliest assault. The bombs tore through the embassies and nearby buildings, killing 213 people and wounding some 4,500 in Kenya alone. The Tanzania attack, conducted minutes later, killed 11 people and wounded 85.

Al-Libi, believed to be a computer specialist for al-Qaeda, conducted visual and photographic surveillance of the US Embassy in Nairobi in late 1993, the federal court indictment against him and others alleges. In 1994, he and other al-Qaeda members researched alternate potential sites in Nairobi including the local office of the US Agency for International Development, as well as “British, French and Israeli targets,” according to the indictment.

His path to Kenya and al-Qaeda remains unclear. Al-Libi is believed to have spent time in Sudan, where Osama bin Laden was based in the early 1990s. After bin Laden was forced to leave Sudan, al-Libi turned up in Britain in 1995 where he was granted political asylum under unclear circumstances and lived in Manchester. He was arrested by Scotland Yard in 1999, but released because of lack of evidence and later fled Britain. After his indictment in December 2000 over the embassy bombings, US officials said they believed he was hiding in Afghanistan.