Story highlights ISIS says one of its top propagandists was killed in a coalition airstrike in Syria

It is thought the editor was Ahmad Abousamra, a Syrian-American who grew up in Massachusetts

(CNN) ISIS has revealed the chief editor of its online propaganda magazine was an American computer scientist.

The group named the media operative as Sheikh Abu Sulayman ash Shami in the eighth edition of its online magazine Rumiyah, which was released early Thursday. It said he was killed in a coalition airstrike near Tabqa, Syria, just to the southwest of Raqqa, during the second week of January.

His picture and his biography have striking similarities with Ahmad Abousamra, a 35-year-old Syrian-American who grew up in the leafy Boston suburb of Stoughton, Massachusetts, and who was first placed on the FBI most wanted list in 2013 and made the subject of a $50,000 reward because of his connections to a Massachusetts terrorism investigation centering on his alleged close associate Tarek Mehanna, who was arrested in 2009 and convicted of terrorism-related charges in a Boston court in late 2011.

A US law enforcement official told CNN's Evan Perez Friday that US counterterrorism agencies believe Abousamra was playing a leading role in ISIS' propaganda operations in Syria and is the same person featured in the ISIS magazine's eulogy. The FBI has not yet confirmed that Abousamra was killed, the U.S. official said. The official noted ISIS operatives have in the past faked their own deaths in attempts to "take the heat" off themselves, so US officials are working to corroborate whether he was killed.

According to the indictment against him, Abousamra traveled to Pakistan in 2002 to try to get terrorist training so he could enter Afghanistan to fight and kill American soldiers. But he failed and returned to the United States. In 2003 Abousamra and Mehanna discussed the feasibility of killing a US executive branch official, a cooperating witness who was party to the conversation told the FBI. Later in the year the trio discussed launching an attack on a US mall, inspired by the Washington sniper shootings, according to the witness, who began cooperating with the FBI in 2006. The informant said they backed out of the plan after failing to get hold of automatic weapons.

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