THE search for Africa’s most wanted terrorist, a man who has for 12 years evaded US special forces, Israeli spies and cruise missile attacks, has taken on new urgency after the double bombing in Uganda that brought carnage to the nation’s capital.
Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, al-Qaida’s East Africa chief, is thought to be the mastermind behind the Kampala, Uganda, blasts that killed at least 76 people and are thought to have involved at least one suicide bomber.
Police arrested a man yesterday near the Kenyan-Somali border in connection with the co-ordinated attacks, which underlined the links between al-Qaida’s global terrorist network and al Shebab, Somalia’s Islamist insurgents.
Personifying that link is Mohammed, a top commander of al Shebab. The 37-year-old from the Comoros islands, who is suspected of involvement in Sunday’s attack, is already wanted for bombing the US embassy in Kenya in 1998 and an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa in 2002. The FBI lists Mohammed as one of its most wanted terrorists and has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture.
“Highly intelligent and thoroughly trained, [Mohammed] is one of the most dangerous international terrorists alive today,” a profile compiled by the Combating Terrorism Center, at the West Point military academy in New York, said.
Synchronised multiple attacks of the kind that shook Kampala are Mohammed’s speciality. He took over as al-Qaida’s most senior operative after the assassination of Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan by U.S. Navy SEALs in September.
Mohammed is a survivor. Numerous U.S.-planned assassination attempts have failed and he has slipped through the hands of Kenyan detectives repeatedly, most recently in August 2008 when he evaded a dragnet in the resort town of Malindi in which his diary was seized.
His ability to evade capture has added to his fearsome reputation. “Fazul is the most veteran of the veterans of East Africa’s al-Qaida wing,” said Rashid Abdi, an analyst at the International Crisis Group in Nairobi.
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