"There's other top people doing dawah. They've done istekhara [prayer for guidance] from what we guess."
A security source told the Daily Telegraph, the man they were referring to was Abu Zaid al-Kuwaiti.
"We do not think that they met Kuwaiti but it is possible they were acting for one of his lieutenants," the source said.
MI5 had previously tracked the two Irfans to Miran Shah in North Waziristan in the tribal area of Pakistan, not far from where Kuwaiti was killed a year after their visit.
Abu Zaid al-Kuwaiti had indeed been identified as among the top five leaders in al-Qaeda and even as a possible successor to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader.
His real name is Khalid Abdurrahman al-Husainan and he was killed, while eating his breakfast, by a missile from an unmanned drone last December.
The 46-year-old cleric had been promoted earlier in the year following the death of Abu Yahya al-Libi, al-Qaeda's second in command, taking over his role as a senior religious scholar.
The missile attack on the village of Mubarak Shahi near Mir Ali in the tribal area of North Waziristan in Pakistan also killed ten others.
One of his wives and his daughter were apparently wounded in the attack and his wife died the following day at hospital in the town of Miran Shah – which was where the two Irfans had gone for their terrorist training.
A statement on jihadi websites read: "We announce the martyrdom of Sheikh Khalid al-Husainan who died while eating suhoor [dawn meal before fasting], and we ask Allah to accept him in paradise."
Husainan's son, 20-year-old Abdulsalam, said that his family in Kuwait received the news "with mixed emotions of sadness and delight."
He said his father "spoke fondly about his desire to seek martyrdom" before he left for Afghanistan in 2007.
Husainan had graduated from the prestigious Mohammad bin Saud University in Saudi Arabia with a degree in religious principles, giving him enormous cache within al-Qaeda.
As a preacher in Kuwait he worked at the Saad al-Abdullah Academy, where Kuwaiti military officers are trained, and as a lecturer at the state-run Kuwaiti Ministry of Religious Endowments before moving on to preach at a mosque in Jleeb al-Shuyoukh, a town near Kuwait airport popular with South Asian and Middle Eastern migrant workers.
He was involved in controversy in 1996 when he was accused of being one of a group of radical Islamists who abducted two women and took them to a remote location where they whipped them as punishment for what they considered to be a "shameful act."
The case became known as the "Desert Flogging Case" but al-Husainan was acquitted.
Then in 2007 he suddenly disappeared from his job in Kuwait and travelled to Afghanistan, reportedly by passing through Iran.
Less than two years later, in August 2009, al-Husainan was publicly identified by al-Qaeda's media wing, as-Sahab, as a prominent leader.
In popular video messages he said he had been "travelling in Afghanistan from village to village and from city to city and from province to province" and added: "Praise Allah, I speak in the mosques and encourage the Afghan people to perform jihad and encourage them to stand by the mujahideen and encourage them to expel the crusaders who have corrupted the people and land."
His beard has variously appeared jet black, hennaed and grey in the numerous videos that have since appeared online.
An excerpt of a Khalid Abdurrahman al-Husainan video message to Barack Obama
In a message to Barack Obama from August 2009 he claimed he had been caught in a "battle" and goaded: "Your soldiers besieged me. I was besieged by your soldiers for ten hours. I was besieged by thirty tanks accompanied by helicopters and warplanes."
He went on: "We came to Afghanistan to be killed as martyrs in Allah`s path. We came to Afghanistan for the hereafter" and added: "This worldly life is transient and death comes suddenly."
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