MOGADISHU, 11 January 2007 — A senior Al-Qaeda suspect wanted for bombing US embassies in East Africa was killed by US airstrikes, a Somali official said yesterday as witnesses said US forces launched a third day of strikes. Reports also said over 100 civilians were also killed.

Also yesterday, Somalia’s deputy prime minister said American troops were needed on the ground to root out extremists from his troubled country, and he expected the troops soon.

The death of Al-Qaeda suspect Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was detailed in an American intelligence report passed on to the Somali authorities. Mohammed, one of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists who had evaded capture for eight years, was allegedly harbored by a Somali Islamic movement that had challenged this country’s Ethiopian-backed government for power.

“I have received a report from the American side chronicling the targets and list of damage,” Abdirizak Hassan, the Somali president’s chief of staff, told the AP. “One of the items they were claiming was that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is dead.”

In Washington, a US intelligence official said Tuesday the US killed five to 10 people believed to be associated with Al-Qaeda. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a small number of others present, perhaps four or five, were wounded.

Also yesterday, at least four AC-130 gunship strikes took place around Ras Kamboni, the rugged area on the Somali coast a few kilometers from the Kenyan border that the US also attacked Monday, a local resident who declined to give his name told two-way radio operator Doorane Adan Harere in Nairobi, Kenya.

The Pentagon denied US involvement in at least two later helicopter strikes in the region reported by the Somali Defense Ministry. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and European Commission Vice President Franco Frattini yesterday backed the US campaign against Al-Qaeda, after the EU executive condemned the airstrikes. Blair said it was Britain’s duty to support those fighting terrorists, as he called the extremists in Somalia a threat to the wider world while Frattini said: “The problem is not the Americans, but the terrorists.” US foe Iran condemned the strike as a violation of international law while the United Nations condemned action that could worsen conflict in the Horn of Africa.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon warned against the “new dimension this kind of action could introduce to the conflict” and the Security Council was due to meet later yesterday to discuss the situation and proposals for African peacekeepers. On Tuesday, helicopter gunships attacked suspected Al-Qaeda fighters in the south, a day after US forces staged airstrikes in the first offensive in the African country since 18 American soldiers were killed there in 1993, witnesses said.

Meanwhile in Mogadishu, former President Abdiqasim Salad Hassan, who is close to the Islamic movement, met with the current interim president yesterday.

They both expressed support for an African peacekeeping force to replace Ethiopian troops in the country.