Somali militants vow allegiance to new al Qaeda chief
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Somali militants vow allegiance to new al Qaeda chief - CNN.com
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CNN) -- The Somali militant group al-Shabaab, an affiliate of al Qaeda, has endorsed the takeover of Ayman al-Zawahiri to head al Qaeda after U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden last month, according to an al-Shabaab spokesman.
"We welcome Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and we will work with him, as we did with our late brother Osama bin Laden, and we are part of al Qaeda, as we promised before, said al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Dhere.
Al-Shabab, which controls large parts of southern Somalia, had previously vowed allegiance to bin Laden.
Somali security forces recently killed Fazul Mohamed, al Qaeda's top commander in eastern Africa, in a shootout at a police checkpoint in Mogadishu, the Somali capital.
The United States had a $5 million bounty on Mohamed's head. He was accused of being the mastermind behind the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Somali militants vow allegiance to new al Qaeda chief - CNN.com