MOGADISHU – Somali police said at the weekend that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Africa’s most wanted al-Qaeda militant, was killed in the capital last Tuesday.
Mohammed, who was reputed to run al-Qaeda in east Africa, operated in Somalia and evaded capture for over a decade after being accused of playing a lead role in the 1998 US embassy attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, which killed 240 people.
Police said they shot Mohammed at a checkpoint in Mogadishu after an exchange of fire at midnight on Tuesday in the chaotic country where Mohammed, also known as Harun, an accomplished linguist and computer expert with at least 18 aliases, is believed to have been hiding for most of the past decade.
Washington says several al-Qaeda members involved in the embassy bombings sought sanctuary in Somalia’s south, its most violent region.
Somalia, Kenya’s northern neighbour, has been without an effective central government since the overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.
“We have confirmed he was killed by our police at a control checkpoint this week,” Halima Aden, a senior national security officer, said in Mogadishu.
“He had a fake South African passport and of course other documents. After thorough investigation, we confirmed it was him, and then we buried his corpse,” the national security officer said.
The United States had offered a $5 million (€3.5 million) reward for information leading to the capture of the Comoran, who spoke five languages and was said to be a master of disguise, forgery and bomb-making.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said, on a visit to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: “Harun Fazul’s death is a significant blow to al-Qaeda, its extremist allies and its operations in East Africa. It is a just end for a terrorist who brought so much death and pain to so many innocents . . . and our own embassy personnel.”
A senior US official in Washington said his killing removed one of the group’s most experienced operational planners in east Africa and has almost certainly set back operations.
US officials say Mohammed, believed to be in his mid-30s, also masterminded an attack on an Israeli-owned hotel along Kenya’s coast in November 2002 that killed 15 people.
At times, Somali sources say, Mohammed hid among mixed-race, minority communities that live in villages dotted along the coast between Mogadishu and the Kenya border, where his looks blended in well with the coast’s Benadir and Bajuni people of mixed Somali, Arab, Persian, Portuguese and Malay ancestry.
These accounts fit with Mohammed’s well-known method of “hiding in plain sight”.
Adopting the guise of an itinerant Islamic preacher, he settled in an isolated Kenyan coastal village, Siyu, near Somalia’s south, in 2002, evading detection for months before and after the hotel bombing.
Shortly after, he slipped into southern Somalia. Local residents said that every morning Mohammed exercised on a beach near Gendershe before he left to live just south of Mogadishu.
However, in recent years he was believed to have been more often under the protection of al-Shabaab fighters in inland areas. – (Reuters)