U.S. STRIKE IN SOMALIA AIMS AT 3 FUGITIVES

Under cover of the Ethiopian move into Somalia, U.S. officials launched an intensive effort to capture or kill three key suspects in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa more than eight years ago that killed 224 people.

A U.S. Air Force Special Operations gunship struck a location in southern Somalia where some of the suspects were believed to be hiding, a U.S. Defense Department official said Monday.

Witnesses and Somalian government officials said there were many people killed or wounded but that they had no exact numbers. U.S. military and counter-terrorism officials said they did not know whether the strike, made within the previous 24 hours, killed any of the three fugitives.

“It’s not clear what the outcome is at this point,” said the counter-terrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the operation was classified.

Abdirahman Dinari, the Somalian government spokesman, said early reports suggested that among the dead were several leaders of the fleeing Islamic Courts Union recently driven from the capital, Mogadishu, along with “one of the leaders of Al Qaeda in East Africa.” He declined to identify the leader.

The strikes targeted small villages in the vicinity of the port city of Kismayo, he said.

“The explosions shook our village,” said Hussein Abdi, a resident of Afmadow. He said refugees from a nearby village told him at least six were killed.

A government official in Kismayo said soldiers captured 28 suspected Islamist fighters amid the chaos.

Dinari said leaders of the transitional government requested U.S. support and were aware of the impending strike.

U.S. officials have secretly been negotiating with Somalian clans who are believed to have sheltered the three embassy bombing suspects, hoping to obtain information about their locations. It could not be determined Monday whether the airstrike was based on information provided by the clans.

A U.S. intelligence official said it was unlikely that all three fugitives were traveling together but added that U.S. military operatives had been tracking the men for some time, waiting for an opportunity to strike.

“They were on the move, it was a thinly populated area, and this is what you got,” the official said, adding that the AC-130 gunship used in the attack “is not the kind of weapon you generally deploy in downtown Mogadishu.”

“This thing does some violence; it would not be the most surgical event,” the official said.

The gunship was based in Djibouti, just north of Somalia. The strike was first reported by CBS News and independently confirmed by The Times.

CIA, FBI and military teams have been tracking the men, particularly their alleged leader, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, for years, but the fugitives have proved elusive.

U.S. officials and their African and European allies in the negotiations believe that one Somalian sub-clan in particular has been harboring Mohammed and his associates, whom the U.S. describes as the leaders of an East African Al Qaeda cell. Mohammed, a native of the Indian Ocean island nation of Comoros, faces terrorism charges in the United States that could bring the death penalty if he is captured and convicted.

Intelligence gathered over the last week indicates that Mohammed and aides Abu Taha al Sudani of Sudan and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan of Kenya recently fled their haven in Mogadishu and headed for the Kenyan border as Ethiopian troops entered the capital and routed the Islamic militias that controlled it.

U.S. officials believe that influential members of the Ayr sub-clan, which they say has sheltered the three, have been in touch with the fugitives. Clan members could provide their pursuers with detailed intelligence about where the men might go and who else within their network of extremists might be hiding them, according to several U.S. counter-terrorism and diplomatic officials familiar with the negotiations.

“We are working through the clans to get at these people,” one U.S. diplomatic official said. “That’s a political reality in Somalia. The clan is the biggest institution, as much as there are any institutions.”

But negotiations with the militant Ayr could raise questions about whether the Bush administration is bargaining with terrorists or those harboring them. The U.S. diplomatic official denied that, saying that engaging the groups, either directly or through intermediaries, was the only realistic way of gathering useful intelligence on the men and perhaps apprehending them.

Mohammed, who has a $5-million U.S. bounty on his head, was indicted in 1998 by a federal grand jury along with Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and others for his alleged role in the bombings that year of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

U.S. officials also accuse the three fugitives of involvement in the 2002 bombing of a hotel in which 15 people were killed and an attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner, both near the Kenyan port city of Mombasa.

It remains unclear whether U.S. authorities would take any of the three men into custody if captured, because Kenya and other countries also have expressed interest in trying them.

Officials said they could not discuss the details of the talks with Somalian clans, saying they were extremely sensitive and being conducted at a particularly delicate time. The International Contact Group on Somalia, composed of the U.S. and European and African nations, has recently begun working to disarm the various Somalian factions and provide foreign aid.

Although no one is offering clan leaders amnesty for harboring suspected Al Qaeda operatives, U.S. officials said, the negotiations aim for something just short of that, such as inclusion in the political process in exchange for cooperation on the counter-terrorism front.

The Islamic Courts Union, which last year seized control of Mogadishu and other key Somalian cities, is made up of at least 15 small, clan-based “courts,” some of which are moderate, others showing signs of militancy. U.S. officials believe the Ayr sub-clan plays important roles in the Islamic courts, and that at least one of its influential members has direct ties to senior Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, according to U.S. intelligence officials and reports by independent terrorism analysts.

Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, an Ayr cleric who has been instrumental in establishing and running the Islamic Courts Union, is wanted by the U.S. government for allegedly having ties to Al Qaeda leaders, including Bin Laden.

U.S. officials say Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, a young Ayr leader in charge of one of the union’s most violent militias, received military training at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan before the U.S.-led military invasion of that country in late 2001.

Ayr leaders have publicly denied such allegations.

U.S. officials described the hunt for the suspected Al Qaeda operatives as confounding, as they tried to figure out who could speak for the clan, whom to trust and who could deliver intelligence on the fugitives or hand them over to authorities.

One of those intermediaries is apparently Somalian Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi, who held a closed-door meeting Jan. 2 with Ayr leaders at a Mogadishu hotel and requested that they hand over their weapons and support the United Nations-backed transitional government he heads.

Jendayi E. Frazer, the U.S. assistant secretary of State in charge of African affairs, was unavailable for comment, as she was returning Monday from Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, where she had been part of the International Contact Group meeting, a spokesman said.

In congressional testimony in June, Frazer said the three suspects posed “an immediate threat to both Somali and international interests in the Horn of Africa.... We must deny them the ability to plan and operate.”

She added at the time that the administration was “constantly reviewing and updating our approach to reflect the fluid dynamics inside Somalia,” and that it would “continue working with Somalis, regardless of clan, religious or secular affiliation.”

John Prendergast, a former Africa policy official in the National Security Council and State Department under President Clinton, said he was skeptical of the secretive talks.

Prendergast, who visits Somalia frequently as a senior advisor at the nonprofit International Crisis Group, said the clans are deeply mistrustful of the Bush administration, particularly because of clandestine efforts by the CIA to fund some warlords and undermine the authority of others.

Also, Prendergast said, though clan members may support the three fugitives, they don’t control them and are extremely unlikely to engage in any betrayal of them unless other powerful Somalian clans and political leaders promise a significant prize in return.

What’s more, Prendergast said, the fugitives have managed to elude capture for nearly a decade and are not likely to sit around and wait for someone to turn them in. “I’d be surprised if those guys didn’t get out of the way a long time ago. They’d be stupid to have hung around this long,” he said.

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josh.meyer@latimes.com

Times staff writer Edmund Sanders in Nairobi contributed to this report.