BRITISH troops shot dead one of al-Qaeda’s most elusive fugitives yesterday after his extraordinary flight from a US prison in Afghanistan to a luxury villa in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

Omar al-Farouk, 35, was handpicked by Osama bin Laden to run al-Qaeda’s network in South-East Asia and was captured in June 2002, weeks before he allegedly planned to bomb eight American embassies across the region.

The Kuwaiti-born terror suspect was groomed at an Afghan camp and sent to Indonesia, where he was arrested while hiding in a mosque. Al-Farouk was flown to one of America’s most secure detention centres at Bagram airbase on the outskirts of Kabul. But he and three fellow al-Qaeda suspects picked the locks and escaped across a minefield in July last year.

He later appeared on an Arab television channel taunting his US captors and vowing to carry out terror attacks in America. Major Charlie Burbridge, a British military spokesman, told The Times that the military had spent several days planning the raid after a tip-off from US Intelligence last week that al-Farouk was in Iraq.

He was hiding in the affluent Tanuma neighbourhood, one of the few areas of Basra relatively free of armed Shia militias, who would have regarded him as an enemy.

Major Burbridge said that 250 soldiers from the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment surrounded the villa before dawn yesterday. When troops stormed the property they found al-Farouk alone in the building. He shot at the soldiers and was killed when they returned fire. “We wanted to arrest him, but regrettably he opened fire,” Major Burbridge said.

Troops found no weapons or explosives in the property nor any trace of al-Qaeda propaganda. There was nothing to suggest that al-Farouk was plotting an attack on coalition troops or any other targets.

Major Burbridge said it was possible that al-Farouk had rented the house on his own without the help of any militant network in Basra. He is understood to have known the city from his youth. “He was on the run and had gone on hiding. He thought he could use a safe house in Basra, but that wasn’t the case,” the military spokesman added.

Major Burbridge refused to say when al-Farouk had slipped into Iraq, or the route he used, though US Intelligence appears to have been tracking his progress.

A local police commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Kareem al-Zubaidi, identified him by a different name, but said that he was a known Iraqi extremist who returned two weeks ago after reportedly fighting US troops in Afghanistan.

The appearance of such a senior al-Qaeda member in southern Iraq gives credence to reports circulating among Kurdish leaders in the country that key figures from bin Laden’s network are crossing into the country through the poorly policed border with Iran. An Arab diplomat and a Saudi security offical told CBS News at the weekend that al-Qaeda was scaling down its leadership structure in Afghanistan and preparing to move its headquarters to the Middle East.

Al-Farouk was groomed in the early 1990s at Khalden camp in Afghanistan, where a number of British radicals were trained, including the shoe bomber Richard Reid. He was entrusted with setting up a terror network in Indonesia and extending al-Qaeda’s activities across South-East Asia. Former associates now in American custody described how al-Farouq’s linguistic talents enabled him to bind together rival Islamic groups.

He orchestrated attacks on Christian churches in Indonesia but his objective was to orchestrate a series of synchronised bomb attacks on US embassies in the capitals of eight Asian countries to coincide with the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

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