This morning, there was a curious report originating with the Egyptian state press, and then repeated throughout the Western media, that Saif al Adel, a longtime al Qaeda bigwig, had flown from Pakistan to Egypt to turn himself in. The report didn’t make much sense, mainly because it offered no explanation why one of the world’s most wanted terrorists—who has been hunted since at least 1998, when he was implicated in al Qaeda’s embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania—would voluntarily turn himself in. No reason was proffered for al Adel’s supposed decision to simply give up.

Now, a number of press outlets are reporting that it probably wasn’t Saif al Adel at all, but instead a man named Mohammed Ibrahim Makkawi. For years, both the American and Egyptian governments identified “Mohammed Ibrahim Makkawi” as al Adel’s real name. This apparently isn’t true, and so when the real Makkawi flew back to Egypt some confused him for the master al Qaeda terrorist.