Somali insurgents shot down a US drone aircraft flying over the southern port of Kismayu on Monday and were searching for the wreckage, an insurgent spokesman said. Last month, US commandos killed a most wanted al Qaeda suspect allied to Somalia's al Shabaab rebels in a helicopter raid in the rebel-held south of the failed state.
"We fired at an American plane spying for information over Kismayu. Our forces targeted the plane and shot it and we saw the plane burning. We think it fell into the sea," said Sheikh Hassan Yacqub, spokesman for the al Shabaab group in Kismayu.
"We are still searching for it," he told Reuters. Al Shabaab, which Washington says is al Qaeda's proxy in Somalia, controls much of the country's south and central regions where it is waging a insurgency against the fragile UN-backed government of President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed.
Kismayu residents routinely report suspected unmanned US spy planes, believed to be launched from warships in the Indian Ocean, flying above the port.
Residents in one small central town, Galhareeri, said al Shabaab fighters also destroyed a mosque, the grave of a revered Sufi Muslim cleric and a Sufi Muslim university there on Sunday, after shooting in the air to drive away local protesters. The hard-line group has targeted Sufi holy sites and religious leaders in the past, saying their practices go against the insurgents' strict interpretation of Islamic law. "They destroyed the Sheikh Ali Ibaar's grave and our mosque. They also knocked down our Islamic university," elder Hassan Ali said by telephone.
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