US officials said in Washington have said that Al-Qaeda's number two Atiyah abd al-Rahman was killed in Pakistan's Waziristan area on the 22nd of this month. It is seen as a major blow to the terror group since the killing of Osama bin Laden. A senior US Administration official said, Atiyah's death is a tremendous loss for al-Qaeda as its chief Ayman al-Zawahiri was relying heavily on him to run the organisation. However, it was immediately not known how Atiyah was killed. This is the first major blow to al-Queda after the May 2nd operation in which US commandos killed bin Laden in a safe house in Pakistan's garrison city of Abbottabad.