Top al-Qaida suspect 'killed in US airstrike'

A Somali official said today that an al-Qaida suspect who planned the 1998 US Embassy bombings was killed in airstrike.

A senior al-Qaida suspect wanted for the US embassy bombings in East Africa has been killed in a US airstrike in Somalia, a government official said today, quoting the Americans.

“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, said. “One of the items they were claiming was that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is dead.”

Rizak said it was not yet known if Abu Talha al-Sudani, believed to be an explosives expert, or another suspect, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, had been killed.

He also said the interim government had received its own local intelligence reports that Abdirahman Janaqow, one of the deputy leaders of the rival Islamic movement, had been killed in the attack.

At least three US airstrikes have been launched in the country, Hassan added. “I know it happened yesterday, it will happen today and it will happen tomorrow.”

In Mogadishu, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at Ethiopian troops in the south of the capital, but missed the target and hit a house, injuring two civilians, said Khadija Muhyadin.

If confirmed, Fazul’s death would be a major victory for the US in its hunt for the 1998 embassy bombers. That attack killed 225 people.

Fazul, a slight, youthful man born in Comoros, has a €3.7m price on his head for allegedly planning the 1998 attacks on the US Embassies in Nairobi 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 came 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.

Police at the Kenyan coastal border town of Kiunga arrested a wife of Mohammed on Monday, with her three children, according to an internal police report.

Halima Badroudine Fazul Husseine, who initially gave her name as Sofia Mohammed Ali, said she and her children aged between 4 and 15 years, fled Kismayo, where they had lived since December, the report said.