Somali Gov’t: U.S. African Embassy Bomber Fazul Abdullah Mohammed Killed

The Somalian government reports that its forces have killed Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, one of the alleged masterminds of the 1998 terrorist attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

According to the BBC, Somali officials say Mohammed and another militant were shot dead by Somali Transitional Federal Government  forces when they failed to stop at a checkpoint in the capital city of Mogadishu on Wednesday.

“Our forces fired on two men who refused to stop at a roadblock,” TFG commander Abdikarim Yusuf told Agence France-Presse. “They tried to defend themselves when they were surrounded by our men. We took their ID documents, one of which was a foreign passport.”

That passport, from South Africa, was issued in the name of “Daniel Robinson.” The BBC reports that $40,000 in cash, medicine, mobile phones and laptops were also found.

An official with the Somalian National Security Agency told AFP that it had conducted DNA tests and confirmed that one of the men killed was indeed Mohammed.

A US official told the BBC that “there’s strong reason to believe [Mohammed's] dead.”

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was the most wanted man in Africa, with a $5 million bounty on his head for his role in the 1998 embassy bombings, attacks which killed 224 people in Kenya and Tanzania. He later became chief of al-Qaeda in East Africa, as which he is accused of being behind the 2002 bombing of a beach resort in Kikambala, Kenya that killed 13 people as well as the attempted shoot down of an Israeli commercial airliner.

He narrowly escaped death during a 2007 US air strike on the southern Somali town of Hayo. More recently, Mohammed is believed to have fought with the al-Qaeda-affiliated militant group al-Shahab, which controls much of the southern part of the largely lawless country.

Radio Mogadishu published this photo of Mohammed’s corpse, as well as other photos from the scene of his killing:

 

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