A senior al-Qaeda suspect wanted for his involvement in the bombing of US embassies in East Africa has been killed, a Somali official said yesterday as witnesses said US forces had launched a third day of airstrikes.
Also yesterday, Somalia's deputy prime minister said that US troops were needed on the ground to root extremists from his troubled country. He expected the troops would be coming soon.
The death of al-Qaeda suspect Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was detailed in a US intelligence report passed on to the Somali authorities. Mohammed, one of the FBI's most wanted terrorists who had evaded capture for eight years, was allegedly harbored by a Somali Islamic movement that had challenged the Ethiopian-backed regime.
"I have received a report from the American side chronicling the targets and list of damage," Abdirizak Hassan, the Somali president's chief of staff, told reporters. "One of the items they were claiming was that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is dead."
Mohammed, 32, joined al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and trained there with Osama bin Laden, the terror network's leader, the transcript of an FBI interrogation of a known associate showed. He had a US$5 million price on his head for allegedly planning the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 225 people.
At least four AC-130 gunship strikes yesterday took place around Ras Kamboni, the rugged area on the Somali coast a few kilometers from the Kenyan border where the US also attacked on Monday, a local resident who declined to give his name told two-way radio operator Doorane Adan Harere in Nairobi.
On Tuesday, helicopter gunships attacked suspected al-Qaeda fighters in the south, a day after US forces staged airstrikes in the first offensive in the African country since 18 American soldiers were killed there in 1993, witnesses said.
The Ethiopian military provided the targeting information, a US military official said yesterday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity surrounding US Special Operations activities.
Presidential chief of staff Hassan said at least three US airstrikes had been launched since Monday and that more were likely. He also said that local intelligence reports indicated Abdirahman Janaqow, one of the deputy leaders of the rival Islamic movement, had also been killed in the attack.
Somali Deputy Prime Minister Hussein Aideed said that US special forces were needed on the ground, because government forces backed by Ethiopia were unable to capture the last remaining hideouts of suspected extremists.
"The only way we are going to kill or capture the surviving al-Qaeda terrorists is for US special forces to go in on the ground," said Aideed, a former US Marine.
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