US Bombards Somalia for Third Day

US forces launched a third consecutive day of air strikes in Somalia today as Somali government officials said one of three al-Qaida suspects targeted by the raids was believed to have been killed.

The Reuters news agency quoted the unnamed source as saying a new attack was taking place after raids on Monday and yesterday.

"As we speak now, the area is being bombarded by the American air force," the source said, giving no further details.

The French news agency AFP cited locals in the south of the country reporting a new strike close to where US helicopter gunships attacked suspected militant positions yesterday.

"Elders in Badade and Afmadow who made radio contact with us confirmed there was an American air strike in the same area today," a resident told the agency,

Also today, a Somali government official said the US operation was thought to have killed one of three al-Qaida suspects believed to have planned the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people.

"I have received a report from the American side chronicling the targets and list of damage. One of the items they were claiming was that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is dead," said Abdirizak Hassan, the Somali president's chief of staff, not specifying which attack may have killed him.

Mohammed is thought to have been one of the key targets of the US strikes, along with Abu Taha al-Sudani, a Sudanese explosives expert believed to head al-Qaida operations in east Africa, and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Kenyan.

A Pentagon official said yesterday the attacks were based on "credible intelligence" that the three al-Qaida leaders had fled Mogadishu, the Somali capital, to the southern part of the country after an offensive into Somalia last month by Ethiopian forces.

The men have long been sought by the US, which previously tried to capture them with the help of warlords who ruled Somalia through the 1990s until 2005, offering bounties for their capture.

The attacks are America's first direct military action in Somalia since the disastrous operation of the early 1990s, which killed 18 US troops. The action later provided the setting for the Hollywood film Black Hawk Down.

Somali officials said at least 27 people had been killed on Monday in air strikes led by AC-130 gunships around Ras Kamboni. It was not clear whether any of the dead were al-Qaida operatives, though Pentagon officials confirmed that bodies had been seen on the ground.

The village of Haya, near the Kenyan border, was also strafed on Monday, Somali officials said.

Yesterday's strike by two US helicopters near the southern town of Afmadow killed between five and 10 people, according to a US intelligence official cited by the Associated Press. Locals put the death toll at 31, saying two newlyweds were among civilians killed.

The Pentagon said yesterday it had sent an aircraft carrier, the USS Eisenhower, to join three other US warships off the coast for what appeared to be a concerted military operation.

"It's pretty clear that this administration will continue to go after al-Qaida," the White House spokesman Tony Snow told a press conference. "People who think they can establish a safe haven for al-Qaida any place have to know that we are going to find them."

The US tracked the Islamists from its Combined Task Force headquarters in Djibouti, which was established as a counter-terrorism base after the September 11 2001 attacks.

The US attacks have the support of the Somali government, whose shaky grip has been challenged by the rise of the Islamist Courts Movement. The US "has a right to bombard terrorist suspects who attacked its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania", the Somali president, Abdullahi Yusuf, told journalists in Mogadishu.

They are being carried out under cover of Ethiopia's military push into Somalia late last month, which is believed to have forced the leadership of the militant Islamic Courts Union from Mogadishu.

Like Ethiopia, the Bush administration accuses the Islamist Courts Movement of harbouring al-Qaida fighters and of having fallen under al-Qaida's influence.

In recent years, the US has deepened its cooperation with the Ethiopian intelligence agencies to try to get on-the-ground information on Somalia. Analysts said the US believed the three al-Qaida fugitives had sought refuge with Somali clans.

When Ethiopia sent thousands of troops in to back Somalia's weak government against the Islamists towards the end of last year, the US gave its tacit approval. But analysts said it remained an enormous challenge to establish the whereabouts of suspected al-Qaida cells or to carry out an accurate strike against them, given the limitations of the AC-130.

"It's akin to the heart of darkness, just shooting into the jungle," said Bob Baer, a former CIA agent. "At the end of the day, you are just making more enemies."

Meanwhile, British officials warned of the prospect of al-Qaida followers - jihadists, as they called them - turning their attention to Ethiopia in response to its army's role in overthrowing the Union of Islamic Courts and forcing its members to flee Mogadishu.

Amid the uncertainties about casualties, the Foreign Office said it was unclear whether any British people had been injured in the fighting after claims in the French newspaper Le Monde by the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, that Britons were among the international terrorists killed injured or captured.