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Wednesday, September 16, 2009     FOLLOW UPDATES ON TWITTER

U.S. strike ends 10-year hunt for Al Qaida leader

WASHINGTON — The United States has killed a leading Al Qaida fugitive in northern Africa who had eluded three U.S. strikes in recent years.   

The U.S. military tracked and killed an Al Qaida cell leader who had operated in several countries in the Horn of Africa. Sali Ali Saleh Nabhan was slain in an ambush by U.S. Special Operations Forces in Somalia on Sept. 14.

For the last decade, U.S. intelligence has been tracking both Mohammed and Nabhan. A U.S. source said both men escaped U.S. air strikes at least three times since 2006.


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"This is a man who was constantly on the move, and his death marks a significant achievement," the source said said.

Nabhan was identified as a leading figure in the Al Qaida network in eastern Africa. He was said to have been a top lieutenant of Al Qaida network chief Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, accused of masterminding the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Nabhan was also believed to have been linked to the bombings, in which nearly 250 people were killed.

Nabhan, 30, was tracked to a convoy near the Somali town of Baraawe, about 200 kilometers south of Mogadishu. At that point, four U.S. military helicopters, based on a nearby U.S. Navy ship, appeared and fired automatic weapons toward two trucks.

"There were casualties in the attack carried out by the Americans in the region: two civilians in a nearby vehicle and a woman on the scene of the attack," Somali Gov. Abdul Khader Mohammed told a news conference on Sept. 15. "Five other civilians were also wounded. They carried out this attack without telling us anything."

The source said Nabhan was working with the Al Qaida-aligned Shabab, which has been fighting the pro-Western regime in Mogadishu. He was said to have headed the Al Qaida squad that bombed an Israeli hotel in Mombasa, Kenya in 2002 in which 14 people were killed.

A Yemeni native, Nabhan was said to have helped train fighters for Shabab. He was also identified as the key Al Qaida liasion for the recruitment of African Muslims for the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.



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