A Somali refugee father carries his son in front of shelters at Ifo camp near Dadaab, about 80km (50 miles) from Liboi on the border with Somalia in north-eastern Kenya, Monday. Aid agencies are operating three large refugee camps in Dadaab where about 160,000 Somali refugees are held and said they could provide more staff to help Kenya with any new influx. - Reuters

MOGADISHU (Reuters):

Many people were killed in Somalia in a United States air strike targeting al-Qaida suspects among fleeing Islamist fighters, Somali officials said yesterday.

The U.S. strike, part of a wide offensive also involving Ethiopian planes, was apparently aimed at an al-Qaida cell said to include suspects in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in east Africa and a hotel on the Kenyan coast.

A Somali elder or traditional leader reported a second U.S. air attack yesterday that killed up to 27 people, but that could not be confirmed by other sources.

A Pentagon spokesman confirmed one air attack on Sunday against the top al-Qaida leadership in east Africa. He would not comment on whether the raid was successful, but said it was based on "credible intelligence".

A U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the air strike was believed to have killed one of three al-Qaida members suspected in the embassy bombings.

Washington is hoping to find a handful of al-Qaida members, including Abu Talha al-Sudani, named in grand jury testimony against Osama bin Laden as a Sudanese explosives expert and whom U.S. intelligence believes is al-Qaida's east African boss.

Islamists on the run

It believes al-Sudani, Comorian Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Kenyan Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan are among Islamists who fled towards the Kenyan border after Ethiopia's military helped the interim Somali Govern-ment oust them from the capital last month.

"We don't know which one is the one at the moment," the intelligence official said.

The attack was Washington's first overt military intervention in Somalia since a disastrous peacekeeping mission that ended in 1994, chronicled in the film Black Hawk Down.

Earlier Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to state categorically whether the U.S. military had mounted other air strikes, but indicated he had mentioned all U.S. operations.

"MANY DEAD BODIES"

A senior Somali official said an AC-130 plane, a formidable weapon armed with rapid-firing cannons, rained gunfire on the remote village of Hayo but said the attack was late on Monday.

"There are so many dead bodies and animals in the village," the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.