Somali government forces have killed a senior Jordanian al-Qaeda fighter, national security minister Abdullahi Mohamed Ali has told the BBC.

索马里国家安全部长阿卜杜拉·穆罕默德·阿里向BBC透漏，索马里政府武装杀死一位高级约旦籍基地组织恐怖分子。

Al-Shabab wants its hard-line brand of Sharia introduced all over the country

State media named the suspect as Amar Ibrahim and said he was also a member of the al-Shabab group, which recently vowed¹ to join al-Qaeda's global jihad（拥护运动，护教战争） .

Officials said he had replaced a militant² in the al-Qaeda hierarchy³（层级，等级制度） who had been killed by the US in September.

Al-Shabab, which controls much of southern Somalia, denied the claims.

Mr Ali confirmed to the BBC that an al-Qaeda fighter had been killed, but did not name him and said the government "would provide evidence later".

State media said Ibrahim had replaced Kenyan-born terrorism suspect Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan as al-Qaeda's man in Somalia.

US agents had hunted Nabhan for years over attacks on a hotel and an Israeli airliner⁴ in Kenya in 2002, before killing⁵ him in a helicopter raid（突袭，搜捕） last September.

The US long accused al-Shabab of being al-Qaeda's proxy⁶（代理） in the region, but al-Shabab had denied the links until last month when it released a statement promising⁷ to "combine" its local jihad with al-Qaeda's global fight.

Somalia has been wracked（彻底破坏） by violence for much of the past 20 years. It has not had a functioning central government since 1991.