From Times Online, September 15, 2009

Philippe Naughton

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Somalia’s extremist Islamist militia has vowed to avenge the killing of an al-Qaeda leader in a dramatic raid by American special forces yesterday.

US commandos killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in a helicopter raid on his convoy as it travelled through the Barawe district in lawless southern Somalia. US officials said that another foreign militant had been killed and two men captured.

Nabhan, a 30-year-old Kenyan, was suspected of building the truck bomb that killed 15 people at the Paradise hotel in Mombasa in 2002 shortly after a botched missile attack on an Israeli airliner that was leaving the city's airport.

He was also suspected of involvement in the simultaneous bombings of the US embassies in Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998 in which hundreds of people were killed.

The American special forces, who arrived in four helicopters from a nearby US Navy ship to attack the al-Qaeda convoy, were said to have taken Nabhan's body with them.

“Muslims will retaliate against this unprovoked attack,” a leader of al-Shebab, an extremist movement with suspected links to al-Qaeda, told the AFP news agency today. “The United States is Islam’s known enemy and we will never expect mercy from them, nor should they expect mercy from us."

Western security agencies say that Somalia has become a safe haven for militants, including foreign jihadists, who use it to plot attacks in the region and beyond.

Nabhan, who has long been on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, is believed to have fled to Somalia after the bombing of the Paradise, an Israeli-owned beach hotel. …

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