In another blow to Al Qaeda, the mastermind of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa was killed in Somalia this week, authorities revealed yesterday.

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed had a $5 million bounty on his head and topped the FBI’s most wanted list – but the security forces who killed him didn’t realize who he was at first.

“We buried him,” said Gen. Abdikarim Yusuf Dhagabadan, Somalia’s deputy army chief.

“But soon after checking his documents, (we) exhumed his body and took his pictures and DNA. Then we learned that he was the man wanted by the U.S. authorities.”

The 38-year-old head of Al-Qaeda in east Africa was in a pickup truck filled with medicine, laptops and mobile phones, trying to reach a rebel-controlled area.

It appears Fazul and a comrade took a wrong turn, wound up at a roadblock, and refused to stop, officials said. They put up a fight and were shot to death.

“It’s long overdue,” said Edith Bartley, whose brother and father were among 224 people killed when truck bombs blew up embassies in Kenya and Nairobi.

“This is a good moment.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, visiting Tanzania, called the killing a “significant blow to Al Qaeda, its extremist allies, and its operations in East Africa.”

It comes a month after U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, and a week after a possible successor, Ilyas Kashmiri, was killed in a drone attack.

Four men were convicted of having a role in the bombings in a 2001 trial. A fifth man was convicted of one count but cleared of 280 others in a trial last year.

Bartley noting the 13th anniversary of the bombings is approaching.

“There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about my father and my brother,” she said.

(Source: NY Daily News)