MOGADISHU - US attack helicopters launched fresh air strikes Tuesday in southern Somalia, targeting the suspected command center of Al-Qaeda militants, a Somali defence ministry official said.
The raid came a day after an AC-130 gunship hit at least two villages believed to be hideouts for Al-Qaeda militants, killing "many" people, officials said.
The fresh attack, by at least two helicopters, "was aimed at destroying the command and control facility of the terrorists," a Somali defence ministry official told AFP.
"Somali troops and Ethiopian forces will go to the area," added the official who declined to be identified.
Ali Said Yusuf Mohamed, a resident of Afmadow, a town about 420 kilometres (260 miles) southwest of Mogadishu, said two helicopters flew over and "dropped some bombs" on a nearby village.
Mohamed could not identify the aircrafts but the defence ministry confirmed they were US military helicopters.
Government officials reported many died in the attack carried out on Monday by the gunship, an armed variant of the C-130 Hercules transport plane, designed for close air support.
"Many people were killed and I think the terrorists were eliminated," Information Minister Ali Jama told AFP.
"Absolutely, a lot of people were killed," government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari told AFP. "So many dead people were lying in the area, we do not know who is who, but the raid was a success."
President Abdullahi Yusuf defended the raids which came after the Somali Ayr subclan -- believed to be sheltering the Al-Qaeda operatives -- allegedly refused the disclose the location of three suspects being sought by Washington for attacks.
Bombing suspects Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, a native of the Comoros Islands, Kenyan Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and a Sudanese national, Abu Taha al-Sudan, are all hiding among the Somali Islamists, according to US officials.
The trio are accused of organising the 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing at least 224 people, most of them Africans.
"The Americans had a right to carry out the air strikes on some Al-Qaeda members," Yusuf told reporters in Mogadishu.
"Those who carried out attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were there, so it was the right thing and the right time to carry out such strikes," Yusuf said.
"The Americans are cracking down on Al-Qaeda terrorists all over the world and this was part of it," he added.
There were no immediate reports of casualties from the second attack.
The AC-130 gunship hit the two villages in the same area late Monday in a raid targeting the three suspects and other Islamist fighters who were chased out of Mogadishu on December 28 by Ethiopian and Somali troops.
The US television network CBS reported that the men were tracked by unmanned US aerial drones.
Ethiopian and Somali troops last week routed the Islamists from their final stronghold in the southern port town of Kismayo, forcing them to flee into scrublands along the border with Kenya. They have vowed to wage a guerrilla war.
Interior Minister Hussein Mohamed Aidid said the US "has the right to defend itself and has an international obligation to support a legitimate government under threat by terrorists."
Yusuf, who took office in 2004, returned to Mogadishu Monday for the first time in 20 years.
The strikes were the first overt US military intervention in Somalia since the early 1990s.
The last such effort ended in 1994 with the final withdrawal of US forces from the UN-backed Operation Restore Hope following heavy losses in what was dramatized in the book and film "Black Hawk Down."
However, last year, the United States covertly supported warlords fighting the Islamist movement that captured Mogadishu in June, marking the latest chapter in Somalia`s slide towards chaos since civil war broke out in 1991.
In August 2003, Kenyan security forces arrested Mohamed -- who has a five-million bounty on his head -- but he escaped when an accomplice set off a hand grenade killing himself and a Kenyan police officer.
Attacks in 2002 on an Israeli airliner and Israeli-owned hotel in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa also originated in Somalia, according to US officials.
Apart of the three, Washington has also designated Somali Islamist hardline leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys as a terrorist.

01/09/2007 15:33 GMT