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SOMALIA: AL-SHABAB SAYS AL-QAEDA LEADER HELD IN US RAID OPERATION September 16, 2009
Somalia’s Islamist radical group Al-Shabab says American troops captured the top Al-Qaeda operative tied with the East Africa terror attacks following air strike on his car in southern Somalia.
Al-Shabab spokesman Sheik Ali Mohamud Rage confirmed to the local media that Saleh Ali Nabhan was not dead but injured in the air operation but taken him away along with other Islamic fighters by the US marines using helicopters around Barawe town in lower Shabelle region, south of Somalia.
“Abu Yusuf Saleh Ali Nabhan and his security guards were ambushed by US soldiers with six helicopters. They really fought hardly but eventually defeated by the invaders. They were injured and fallen in the hands of Allaha’s enemy,” said Sheik Rage.
But some sources close to the Islamists say the helicopters that carried out the mission were French.
He said this is not the first time that US troops target members of Al-Shabab adding that Adan Hash Ayrow, the group’s leader was killed in US air attack on his house in central Somalia last year.
On Monday, the US war planes attacked a village, 200 kilometers south of the capital targeting a vehicle and killing people inside, witnesses in the area said.
The attack occurred in the small village of Erile, around 200 kilometres (120 miles) south of the capital Mogadishu, shortly after 1:30 pm (1030 GMT), the sources said.
US government believed that Nabhan who was at large had been hiding in Somalia after the bombings on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.