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Terrorist was behind the 1998 attacks on two embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed hundreds of people The terrorist behind the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa – the attack that brought al-Qaida to global attention – has been killed in Somalia. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who had a $5m price tag put on his head by American authorities, was one of the most wanted Islamist militants in the world. The embassy attacks – in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania – killed more than 200 people and injured several thousand. The majority of the casualties were local African staff or passersby caught in the multiple explosions that destroyed the buildings. Mohammed also organised the 2002 attacks on two Israeli targets, including the bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya, which killed 13 people, and an attempt to shoot down a passenger plane on a flight to Israel. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who was on a visit to Tanzania as news of the death broke, described the killing as a “significant blow to al-Qaida, its extremist allies, and its operations in east Africa”. “It is a just end for a terrorist who brought so much death and pain to so many innocents in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and elsewhere – Tanzanians, Kenyans, Somalis and our own embassy personnel,” she said. A senior American official in Washington said that his killing removed one of the group’s “most experienced operational planners in east Africa and has almost certainly set back operations”. News of Mohammed’s death comes just six weeks after the death of the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, in a US special forces raid in Pakistan. Last week Ilyas Kashmiri, another senior terrorist with ties to al-Qaida, was also reported to have been killed. Kenyan police, who cited Somali officials, said Mohammed had been shot dead when he and an associate refused to stop at a checkpoint north-west of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, earlier this week. The dead man, thought to be aged 38, had a false passport and $40,000 in cash it was reported. “We have confirmed he was killed by