US and Iraqi forces have killed a senior al-Qaeda leader believed to have been behind the kidnapping of the British peace activist Norman Kember and the murder of an American seized with him.

Muhared Adbul Latif al-Jebouri had been named information minister of the “Islamic State of Iraq”, a caliphate declared by a coalition of extremist Sunni groups in the lawless areas north of Baghdad.

Abu Muhammad al-Jebouri, the dead man’s brother, confirmed that the militant leader had been killed in a battle with US and Iraqi forces in Ghazaliyah, west Baghdad, where Sunni and Shia gunmen are fighting for supremacy.

A four-man team of militants was trying to take the body back to al-Jebouri’s home town of Duluwiyah, just north of Baghdad, when they were stopped at an Iraqi army check-point in the al-Qaeda stronghold of Tajji. A gun battle ensued in which two of the militants were killed and the other two arrested. The body was seized by the Iraqi troops.

Al-Jebouri, a former military intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein’s army, was believed to have been responsible for kidnapping American journalist Jill Carroll in January last year, and for the abduction and murder of Tom Fox, an American peace activist seized together with Mr Kember, a British member of the Christian Peacemaker Team.

The Islamic State of Iraq was declared last autumn by a coalition of al-Qaeda-linked and hardcore Sunni insurgent groups. It is focused on Diyala province to the northeast of Baghdad, although it lays claim to six other governorates, including Baghdad.

The aim of the “state” is to recreate a Sunni land in the image of Arabia at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, as the Taleban had tried to do in Afghanistan. The movement enforces a rigorous version of Salafist Islam, banning men from shaving, having short hair like American soldiers or even smoking. Men caught repeatedly smoking have their index fingers rammed into metal pipes and then snapped, while cigarette shops have been torched.

The rules have often been taken to absurd extremes. Greengrocers in the “caliphate” told The Times that they had been ordered not to sell bananas in public because they were deemed obscene, while cucumbers could not be sold next to tomatoes, which are deemed to represent femininity. At the most extreme, shepherds have been ordered to cover the nether regions of their goats to avoid offending strict Salafist sensibilities.

Confusion surrounded early reports of the killing. US officials said that al-Jebouri’s body may have been mistaken for that of Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the al-Qaeda kingpin, whom Iraqi forces claimed to have killed.

Major-General William Caldwell, the US military spokesman in Baghdad, said that al-Jebouri was killed on Tuesday, the same day that al-Masri was said to have been shot, hinting that Iraqi officials had mixed up the two leaders.

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