The United States, facing growing international criticism over an air strike targeting al-Qaeda suspects in Somalia, denied reports on Wednesday it had carried out further strikes.
A Somali government source and a local lawmaker said US planes struck several sites on Wednesday after an assault on Monday against a village where the suspects were thought to be hiding.
But an official in Washington said, ”There have been no additional attacks.”
US government sources said US ally Ethiopia, which defeated Islamist forces in a lightning war last month, had conducted further air strikes since Monday.
The Somali officials did not say how they distinguished between US and Ethiopian planes operating in the remote southern area where Islamists were driven after their defeat.
The government source said four new US strikes hit areas near Ras Kamboni, a coastal village close to the Kenyan border long thought by Western and East African intelligence agencies to be a hide-out and training camp for Islamic militants.
”As we speak now, the area is being bombarded by the American air force,” said the source, talking to Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Somali officials said many died in Monday’s strike — the first overt US military action in Somalia since a disastrous humanitarian mission ended in 1994.
Amnesty International said it had written to the US government expressing concern, echoing UN chief Ban Ki-moon, France, the European Union, former colonial power Italy, Egypt and the Arab League.
”We are concerned that civilians may have been killed as a result of a failure to comply with international humanitarian law,” said Claudio Cordone, an Amnesty International official.
At the United Nations, the Security Council raised no questions or objections on Wednesday after a US diplomat told a closed-door meeting on Somalia that Washington’s air strike on Monday targeted ”a high-level al-Qaeda leader”.
”There was no discussion of this particular issue and I have no comment on that,” Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, the council president for January, told reporters after the meeting.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said there had been just one US air attack with no civilian casualties.
”They knew where the target was and they suspected that the target would move and they would miss the opportunity unless they acted quickly,” he said.
Meles told a news conference in Addis Ababa that Ethiopian soldiers had gone to the site of the attack. Eight ”terrorists” were killed, five captured and seven escaped, he said.
Lawmaker Abdirashid Mohamed Hidig said after touring the region in an Ethiopian helicopter that at least 50 people were killed by US and Ethiopian air strikes.
Hidig told reporters: ”Yesterday [Wednesday] I personally saw the planes striking. The air strikes resumed this morning.” He spoke in the port of Kismayu after returning from a tour of the area.
”The worst loss has befallen civilians since the fleeing Islamists are hiding among the people there,” he said.
US officials said on Monday’s strike targeted an al-Qaeda cell that includes suspects in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and a 2002 attack on an Israeli-owned Kenyan hotel.
The strike, by an AC-130 plane firing automatic cannons, was believed to have killed one of three al-Qaeda suspects wanted for the embassy bombings, a US intelligence official said.
Washington is seeking a handful of al-Qaeda members, including Comorian Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, indicted in a US court for his suspected role in the embassy bombings.
In Mohammed’s hometown of Moroni, his family waited for news of his fate. ”We had to keep a night vigil in the hope of getting a telephone call,” one of Fazul’s relatives said.
Ethiopia sent thousands of troops across the border last month to oust Islamists who had held sway over most of the south, including the capital, Mogadishu, for six months and threatened to overrun the weak government in its base of Baidoa.
Meles says Ethiopia wants to pull out its troops as soon as possible and make way for African peacekeepers.
Mogadishu residents were awoken by gunfire before dawn on Wednesday in an area housing Ethiopian and Somali troops, who were targeted in a rocket attack on Tuesday.
In another attack, at least one person was killed when Somali militiamen fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an Ethiopian truck, missing it but hitting a house, a government source said. – Reuters