Samir Khan

It was reported in May 2013 that Al Qaeda devotees native to the United States may be using the instruction manuals that Khan has posted online before his death. It was suspected that the Boston Marathon bombing was carried out according to these manuals.

In his book Ticking Time Bomb: Counter-Terrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack (2011), former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman described Australian Muslim preacher Feiz Mohammad, American-Yemeni imam Anwar al-Awlaki, Muslim cleric Abdullah el-Faisal, and Pakistani-American Samir Khan as "virtual spiritual sanctioners" who use the internet to offer religious justification for Islamist terrorism.

He lived in Charlotte before leaving the country for Yemen in 2009. He reportedly cut off ties with his family when he left the U.S. After Khan's death, a family friend told CNN that Khan's father did not agree with his son's ideas and had sought help to change his son's radical views on several occasions.

Khan was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to parents of Pakistani descent and grew up in Queens, New York. He also spent some of his teenage years living in Westbury, New York. He graduated from W. Tresper Clarke High School in 2003 where he wrote for the school newspaper, participated in cheerleading and was an active member of the glee club. According to his classmates, he refused to recite Pledge of Allegiance and blamed Americans for the September 11 attacks. Khan's father, Zafar Khan, is an information technology executive. The family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2004.

In 2003 Khan started a Blogspot blog called "InshallahShaheed" or "Martyr, God willing" from his parents' basement. Before moving to Yemen he launched the magazine Jihad Recollections, "the first online jihadist magazine in English", with four issues, with the last one published in September 2009. After moving to Yemen he became the editor of Inspire. In an article written by Khan and published in Inspire titled, "I am proud to be a traitor to America," Khan outlined his grievances against the United States. According to Ben Venzke, CEO of IntelCenter, "The primary focus of the magazine is to inspire individuals to not just fly to Yemen and join the group, but rather to provide them with the inspiration, the ideological framework, the targeting philosophy and the practical mechanics of building a bomb or conducting a shooting."

Samir ibn Zafar Khan (December 25, 1985 – September 30, 2011) was the Pakistani American editor and publisher of Inspire magazine, an English-language online magazine reported to be published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). A citizen of the United States, he was killed in a drone strike in Yemen together with Anwar al-Awlaki.