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Al-Qaeda target 'may be alive'
05/02/2007 09:41 - (SA)
London - There is as yet no confirmation of the deaths of targeted al-Qaeda suspects who may have been killed in recent fighting in Somalia, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said in an interview published in the Financial Times on Monday.
Meles told the business daily that though bloodied papers had been found belonging to Aden Hashi Ayro, a militant suspected by the United States of protecting leaders of an east African al-Qaeda cell that bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, reported sightings of him suggest he is alive.
The prime minister also said that sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys and Hassan Turki, two leaders of the Islamic Courts Union - a hard-line Islamist party that implemented Sharia law in the parts of Somalia it controlled - were "alive and moving in and out of Kenya on the border".
"We do not have definite information on a number of the key al-Qaeda targets. There are reports that one or two of them might have died but we have no confirmation," Meles was quoted as saying by the FT.
Ethiopia intervened in Somalia in December in a US-backed offensive, followed by successive US air strikes against suspected al-Qaeda operatives there.
Meles said that the United States was assisting with DNA testing on suspects killed in the fighting.
He also dismissed talk of an escalating Islamist insurgency, saying: "If the TFG (the UN-backed Transitional Federal Government) manages to pull off the plans it has for national reconciliation... then the remnants of the Islamic Courts and international jihadists will be politically marginalised."
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