Wrong turn in Mogadishu sent Fazul and Dere to their death

“He is not dead as thousands like him are still in the fight against the enemy of Allah,” a commander of Somalia’s rebel Al-Shabaab movement said last week of the death of Africa’s most wanted man, Fazul Abdulla Muhammad.

That quote was followed by another by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said Fazul’s death was a major setback for the group and its affiliates.

So Fazul is dead, but still alive.

Speaking in Tanzania’s commercial capital during an Africa tour, Clinton called Fazul’s death “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 in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and elsewhere — Tanzanians, Kenyans, Somalis and our own embassy personnel.”

The 38-year-old is thought to have planned the massive truck bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that killed 224 people in 1998 and had a $5 million bounty on his head, making him Africa’s most wanted man.

“We have confirmed by DNA tests carried out with our partners that it definitely was Fazul Abdullah,” an official at Somali’s National Security Agency told AFP.

Set back operations

A senior official from US President Barack Obama’s administration said Fazul’s death “removes one of the terrorist group’s most experienced operational planners in East Africa and has almost certainly set back operations.”

The official credited the “good work” of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government forces in killing Fazul. His death was also confirmed by Kenya’s top police officer Matthew Iteere.

TFG officials said the men were killed at a roadblock on Tuesday night.

“Our forces fired on two men who refused to stop at a roadblock. They tried to defend themselves when they were surrounded by our men,” said TFG military commander Abdikarim Yusuf.

“We took their ID documents, one of which was a foreign passport,” he said, adding that an investigation was under way.

The incident took place on the northwestern outskirts of the Somali capital, a regional security source said. The two men were driving in a pickup truck full of medicine, laptops and mobile phones.

The same source said they appeared to have taken a wrong turn while trying to reach a Shabaab position and ended up in an area under TFG control.

A Somali source close to the investigation said the man identified as Fazul was in possession of a South African passport in the name of Daniel Robinson which gave his date of birth as 1971.

The passport, issued April 13, 2009, indicated that its bearer left South Africa for Tanzania on March 19 and was granted a visa there. The Tanzanian visa was the only one in the passport.

The man was also in possession of about Sh3.2 million in cash, the same Somali source said.

He appeared to have come from Lower Juba in southern Somalia where he was heading a group of foreign fighters under the name of “Abu-Abdirahman the Canadian.”

The second man killed was known Kenyan extremist Mohammed Dere, a Nairobi-based security source told AFP, adding that the Kenyan intelligence services were checking the DNA of the two men.

Contrary to normal practice when such incidents occur, the bodies of the two men were picked up by the Somali intelligence services and given to US officials for identification.

Peppered with holes

Photos taken shortly after the incident show a bloodied corpse lying on its back, with the face turned up and a pickup truck with an armoured windscreen peppered with bullet holes.

The face bears a resemblance to the “Wanted” photos put out by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. The United States had been hunting Fazul for the past decade.

Fluent is several languages and using a variety of pseudonyms, Fazul was a master in disguise and moved freely round the whole region, while still keeping a low profile.

He had been fighting for several years in the ranks of the Shabaab and was in charge of foreign fighters and volunteers.

The Shabaab deliberately cultivates mystery around its foreign fighters, made up mostly of Somalis from the Diaspora and East Africans, who are thought to be implicated in many of the suicide attacks carried out by the rebels.

Fazul’s death came a month after that of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, killed by US Navy SEALs on May 2 in Pakistan.

Fazul joined Al-Qaeda in 1991 and was believed to be behind the August 1998 embassy bombings, the worst attack by Al-Qaeda until the September 2001 attacks on the United States.

Starting in 2002, he was put in charge of the group’s operations throughout East Africa. That same year, he planned anti-Israeli attacks in Mombasa that killed 15 people.

He survived a US raid in January 2007 that left dozens of people dead at Ras Kamboni in southern Somalia.

(AFP)