Somali Militants Execute Alleged U.S. Intelligence Agency Spy

Somalia Islamist militant group al-Shabaab said a man accused of working with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to kill a senior rebel commander for a $1 million reward was one of four people it executed for spying.

Omar Mohamed Kheyr was shot dead by a firing squad in the southwestern town of Bardhere yesterday after admitting to cooperating with the CIA, according to pro-al-Shabaab Radio Andalus. Kheyr was intercepted before collecting the cash reward, Radio Andalus reported, without identifying the al-Shabaab target. The authenticity of the report can’t be independently verified. An e-mailed request for comment sent to the U.S. Embassy in Kenya today wasn’t immediately answered.

Kheyr “confessed that he was working for the CIA and helped with the murder of a senior official of the mujahideen,” an unidentified al-Shabaab judge said in a broadcast on Radio Andalus. “He was promised by the CIA $1 million for the murder of the senior official, so he deserved to test the bitterness of the death.”

The other men executed were working with the governments of Somalia and neighboring Ethiopia, Radio Andalus said.

The al-Qaeda-linked group, deemed a terrorist organization by the U.S., has been waging an insurgency in the Horn of African nation since 2006 to overthrow the government and impose Shariah, or Islamic law.

A U.S. drone strike killed the group’s intelligence chief, Abdishakur Tahliil, in southern Somalia on Dec. 29, three months after a similar attack in the country claimed the life of its leader Ahmed Abdi Godane. While government troops backed by an African Union peacekeeping mission have pushed al-Shabaab fighters from some of their main strongholds since 2011, the group still regularly stages gun and bomb attacks and controls territory.

bloomberg.com