Target of Somalia attack one of FBI's most wanted

The target of US air strikes in Somalia is one of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists and the suspected mastermind of two major terrorist attacks in east Africa.

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a slight man born in Comoros, has a €3.7m price on his head for allegedly planning the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which killed 225 people.

He is also suspected of planning the car bombing of a beach resort in Kenya and the near-simultaneous attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner in 2002.

Fazul, 32, joined al-Qaida in Afghanistan and trained there with Osama bin Laden, according to the transcript of an FBI interrogation of a known associate.

He went to Kenya in the mid-1990s, married a local woman, became a citizen and started teaching at a religious school near Lamu, just 60 miles south of Ras Kamboni, Somalia, where one of the airstrikes took place.

A master of disguise, Fazul can appear African, south Asian or Arab.

He speaks French, Arabic, Swahili and English and the FBI says he likes to dress casually and wear baseball caps.