Somali terror chief believed killed in strike

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Al-Shabaab leader behind Westgate shopping massacre thought to be victim of drone attack.

The Somali Islamist leader who ordered last year's Westgate shopping centre massacre in Kenya is thought to have been killed in an American drone strike.

Ahmed Abde Godane, 37, the leader of al-Shabaab, was targeted by a salvo of missiles as he left a meeting of the group's senior leaders on Tuesday.

The Pentagon was still trying to verify yesterday whether he had died, but witnesses spoke of a sound like an earthquake as missiles hit a forested region in Somalia's Sablale district, 170km south of Mogadishu.

An al-Shabaab spokesman told AP that Godane was in one of two vehicles hit in the attack, which killed six fighters, but declined to say if he was among the dead.

Godane, who once appeared in an al-Shabaab video pledging his allegiance to Osama bin Laden, gave his backing to last September's Westgate atrocity, in which 67 people were killed when gunmen stormed a shopping centre in Nairobi.

In a statement released shortly after the Westgate attack, he threatened further terrorism in Kenya unless it agreed to pull its troops out of Somalia, where they have been trying to oust al-Shabaab from its southern heartlands.

The attack was one of the worst terrorist acts in Kenyan history. Godane, who also went by the name Abu Zubayr, was listed by the US State Department as one of the world's most-wanted terrorist fugitives, with a US$7 million ($8.4 million) bounty on his head.

Somali officials said the first they knew about the drone attack was when government and African Union forces patrolling in the area heard a series of explosions. The strike came as local al-Shabaab forces were on the back foot from a government offensive aimed at seizing key ports.

Godane is known to have taken security precautions after the killing of al-Shabaab leader Adan Hashi Ayro in a US missile strike in 2008.

Godane's death would be a severe blow for the group, which has lost much territory in the past two years after offensives by Somalia's US- and UN-backed Government.