al Qaeda Embassy Bomber Fazul Abdullah Mohammed Reportedly Killed in Somalia
by John Little on 10/01/20071/11/06 Update: Fazul is not dead yet.
We might be able to scratch one off the FBI wanted list. Our operations in Somalia are cause for hope if you support the war on terror:
A senior al Qaeda suspect wanted for bombing U.S. embassies in East Africa has been killed, a Somali official said Wednesday as witnesses said U.S forces launched a third day of airstrikes.
Also Wednesday, Somalia’s Deputy Prime Minister said American troops were needed on the ground to root extremists from his troubled country, and he expected the troops soon.
The death of al Qaeda suspect Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was detailed in an American intelligence report passed on to the Somali authorities. Mohammed, one of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists who has evaded capture for eight years, was allegedly harbored by a Somali Islamic movement that had challenged this country’s Ethiopian-backed government for power.
“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.”
F.A.M. was a bad dude:
Mohammed, 32, joined al Qaeda in Afghanistan and trained there with Osama bin Laden, the terror network’s leader, according to the transcript of an FBI interrogation of a known associate. He has a $5 million price on his head for allegedly planning the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that 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. Ten Kenyans and three Israelis were killed in the blast at the hotel. The missiles missed the airliner.
His infamous crime:
In the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings (August 7, 1998), 257 people were killed and over 4,000 wounded in simultaneous car bomb explosions at the United States embassies in the East African capital cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. The attacks prompted the United States to seek out an organization the assailants could be linked to and prosecuted. Al Qaeda was deemed responsible for the attack, but at the time it was only a loose collection of a few Islamic militants. The U.S.’s efforts to try those responsible for the attack, brought bin Laden and al Qaeda to international attention for the first time, giving the organization its name and portraying it as a large and threatening network of terrorists across the world. This also resulted in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation placing bin Laden atop its Ten Most Wanted list.
Along with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, the Embassy Bombing is one of the major anti-American terrorist attacks that preceded the September 11, 2001 attacks. The United States responded to the attacks by freezing financial assets of related parties and by initiating military action against Afghanistan and Sudan.
More on the Clinton era “military action” here for those of you who’ve forgotten just how ineffective our response was.
The Captain’s Journal: It is about time.
Related:
Wikipedia Bio
PBS NewsHour: African Embassy Bombings
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