Claims that a senior al-Qaeda suspect believed to have been the mastermind behind terror attacks against US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania has been killed in the current wave of air strikes against Islamist strongholds in southern Somalia have been greeted with scepticism in the region.

News agencies reported Somali government officials saying that Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, who is accused of the joint 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam which killed 262 people, was dead. The Somali President’s Chief of Staff said he had received the information from the Americans.

However, reports from the area said Fazul Abdullah had left the hardline Islamist hideout of Ras Kamboni and slipped over the porous border to Kenya, where his wife and many members of his family live, several weeks ago. Regional analysts said they believed reports of his death were misinformation intended to give the impression the operation was a success and mask the danger of the country slipping into an all-out civil war.

Local sources said the Ethiopian forces, who had cornered fugitive Somali Islamists in the area since they were driven out of the capital two weeks ago, had suffered high casualties and called on the US for air support. That support now needed to be justified.

"I suspect we are seeing some classic misinformation going on here… The truth is the American and Ethiopian intelligence from the area has always been suspect," said one expert on Somalia based in Kenya. "Unless, we are shown the bodies of these alleged al-Qaeda operatives, no-one will believe it."

Regional analysts say Somalia’s Islamists were largely made up of members of the Hawiye clan while the US-backed weak transitional government is dominated by the Darod and its sub-clans, historic foes of the Hawiye and former backers of the deposed dictator Mohamed Siad Barre whose fall from power ushered in 15 years of rule by warlords.

They said the situation in Mogadishu, which saw its first period of calm for more than a decade after it was taken by the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) last June, would be the true test of whether the military operation against the Islamists and hardline al-Qaeda sympathisers was a success or not.

"There are several thousand UIC supporters in Mogadishu, what they do is more important for long-term stability in Somalia than whether these al-Qaeda operatives are killed or not," the source added.

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