According to media reports, the United States has killed the head of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, Aiman al-Zawahiri, in a drone attack in Afghanistan.
A US official initially said on Monday only that the US carried out an "anti-terrorist operation against a key al-Qaeda target in Afghanistan" over the weekend.
He added: "The operation was successful and there were no civilian casualties."
According to US media such as the news channel CNN and the newspapers "New York Times" and "Washington Post", the target was al-Zawahiri.
Accordingly, the drone attack could have been carried out by the US foreign intelligence service CIA.
US President Joe Biden wanted to make a television speech about the operation in the evening (7:30 p.m. local time; Tuesday 1:30 a.m. CEST).
The Afghan Interior Ministry had rejected rumors of a drone attack in the capital Kabul at the weekend.
On Tuesday night, Taliban spokesman Sabihullah Mujahid wrote on Twitter that an "air strike" had been carried out on a house in the Sherpur district of Kabul.
Initial investigations had revealed "that the attack was carried out by American drones".
Al-Zawahiri had taken over the leadership of al-Qaeda after the death of Osama bin Laden, who was killed by US special forces in Pakistan in 2011.
Born in Egypt, al-Zawahiri was considered a central figure behind the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States that killed around 3,000 people.
The United States put a $25 million bounty on his head.
The operation, in which al-Zawahiri is believed to have been killed, was carried out almost a year after the US and its western allies withdrew troops from Afghanistan.
In the course of the withdrawal, the radical Islamic Taliban seized power in Afghanistan again and inflicted a great shame on the West.