"Fazul Abdullah Mohammed" who is alleged of organizing the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa, has been killed in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, reports say.
Kenyan police said they had heard the news from Somali officials. DNA examinations are supposed to be under process to verify the dead man's identity. Abdullah was largely regarded as the most wanted man in Africa. The US FBI records him as one of its most wanted men with a $5m prize.
Above 220 people killed and 5,000 were injured in the 1998 bombings, al-Qaeda's first massive assault on US targets.
Abdullah and a partners militants were killed by Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) forces at a roadblock in the Afgooye passage, a roughly 20km-long strip of land north-west of Mogadishu, at about 0200 on Wednesday (2300 GMT on Monday), local security sources told AFP.
Our forces fired on two men who rejected to stop at a passage. TFG commander Abdikarim Yusuf told the AFP news agency, they attempted to protect themselves when they were bounded by our men.
"We get their ID papers, one of which was a foreign passport," he said, adding that medicine, mobile phones and laptops were also found. Somali sources told AFP that Abdullah was moving some $40,000 in cash and a South African passport under the title name of "Daniel Robinson" which was ssued on 13 April 2009. It pointed out that Abdullah had left South Africa on 19 March 2011 for Tanzania, where he was got a visa.
One of the men that was murdered near Mogadishu was Fazul Abdullah, may God bless his soul.
He came out to have come from Lower Juba, in southern Somalia, where he was leading a group of foreign insurgents under the name of "Abu-Abdirahman the Canadian", the sources further said.
Photographs, published by AFP, of the face of one of the bodies turn off resemblances to those issued by the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists website. The two bodies were collected by members of the Somali National Security Agency and then handed over to US authorities for recognition, AFP said.
Matthew Iteere , Kenyan Police Commissioner, told reporters on Saturday that he was interacting with Somali authorities to obtain a inclusive report. We have been told that there were two terrorists who were died in Somalia on Wednesday. They were recognized as Fazul Mohammed and Ali Dere. That is what we have been told by our counterparts," he told Kenyan media. There has until now been no remarks from the US officials.
Born in the Comoros Islands in the early 1970s, Abdullah is thought to have connected with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan during the 1990s. After the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, resulting about 224 people killed, the US blamed him of connection and issued a $5m prize for information leading to arrest.
In 2002, Abdullah was also accused for the bombing of a beach way out in Kenya, which left 13 people dead, and an effort to gun shoot an Israeli aircraft.
In 2007, he stay alive a US air strike on the southern Somali coastal village of Hayo, near the town of Ras Kamboni.
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