US special forces have aborted a mission to capture an al Shabaab leader in Somalia linked to the Nairobi shopping mall massacre after they came under heavy attack.
A Navy SEAL team staged a pre-dawn raid on a house in the southern town of Barawa after swimming ashore before the al Qaeda-linked militants rose for morning prayers.
Reinforcements arrived at the house and SEAL Team Six, the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, encountered fiercer resistance than expected, a senior US military source told The Associated Press.
After a 15 to 20-minute firefight, the unit leader decided to abort the mission and they swam away, the source said.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, in Bali for an economic summit, spoke about the US operation in north Africa, and said terrorists "can run but they can't hide".
A Pentagon spokesman confirmed that US military personnel had been involved in a counter-terrorism operation against a known al Shabaab terrorist in Somalia, but did not provide details.
One of the gunmen in the Kenyan shopping centre attack He said there were no US casualties in the raid.
Within hours of the attack, the US Army's Delta Force carried out a raid in Libya, and captured an al Qaeda leader wanted for the 1998 bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 220 people.
The aborted Somalia operation came 20 years after the famous "Black Hawk Down" battle in Mogadishu, in which a mission to capture Somali warlords went wrong when militia forces shot down two US helicopters and killed 18 American soldiers.
Residents in Barawe, a seaside town some 150 miles south of Mogadishu, said locals woke up to the sound of heavy gunfire.
The SEAL team battled their way inside a two-storey beachside house, where al Shabaab fighters lived, before being driven back.
A US official said the mission in Barawe was aimed at capturing a "high-value target" while trying to avoid civilian casualties.
Al Shabaab leader Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr, also known as Ahmed Godane, claimed responsibility for last month's siege in the Nairobi mall that killed at least 67 people.
He was the target of Saturday's raid, according to a Somali intelligence official.
A Barawe resident called Mohamed Bile said militants closed down the town in the hours after the raid, and were carrying out house-to-house searches to find evidence that a spy had tipped off the US.
"We woke up to find al Shabaab fighters had sealed off the area and their hospital is also inaccessible," he told The Associated Press by phone. "The town is in a tense mood."
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