US embassy bombing suspect gunned down in Somalia

FAZUL Abdullah Mohammed, the suspected mastermind behind the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa, has been killed in the Somali capital of Mogadishu.

Somali police said yesterday that Abdullah, one of the world's most wanted men and a senior al-Qaeda operative, died last week.

"We have confirmed he was killed by our police at a control checkpoint," Halima Aden, a senior national security officer, said in Mogadishu.

DNA tests are expected to confirm the dead man's identity.

Abdullah was widely regarded as the most wanted man in Africa, and America's FBI lists him as one of its most wanted men with a bounty of $5 million (3m) on his head.

A total of 224 people died and 5,000 were hurt in the 1998 bombings on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania - al-Qaeda's first major attack on American targets.

Abdullah and a fellow militant are believed to have been shot dead by Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) forces at a roadblock in the Afgooye corridor, a strip of land north-west of Mogadishu, early last Wednesday.

It is believed Abdullah was carrying some $40,000 in cash and a South African passport bearing the name "Daniel Robinson".

Issued on 13 April, 2009, it indicated that Abdullah had left South Africa on 19 March, 2011, for Tanzania, where he was granted a visa.

He appeared to have come from Lower Juba, in southern Somalia, where he was heading a group of foreign fighters under the name of "Abu-Abdirahman the Canadian".

The two bodies were collected by members of the Somali National Security Agency and then given to US officials for identification.

Kenya's Police commissioner, Matthew Iteere, said yesterday that he was liaising with Somali officials to get a comprehensive report.

"We have been told that there were two terrorists who were killed in Somalia on Wednesday. They were identified as Fazul Mohammed and Ali Dere. That is what we have been told by our counterparts," he told Kenyan media.

There has so far been no comment from the US authorities.

Born in the Comoros Islands in the early 1970s, Abdullah is believed to have joined al-Qaeda in Afghanistan during the 1990s.

After the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, which killed 224 people, the US accused him of involvement and issued a $5m reward for information leading to capture.

In 2002, Abdullah was also blamed for the bombing of a beach resort in Kenya, which left 13 people dead, and an attempt to shoot down an Israeli aircraft.In 2007, he survived a US air strike on the southern Somali coastal village of Hayo, near the town of Ras Kamboni.

Meanwhile, Shabaab rebels in Somalia said yesterday they were behind the killing of interior minister Abdi Shakur Sheikh Hassan after they planted a bomb at his house in Mogadishu.

The attack was seen as a retaliatory hit by Shabaab insurgents after a sustained government push against them. Mogadishu and other parts of Somalia have seen two days of protests against a deal to extend the mandates of the president and parliament.