An officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was killed during a raid to arrest an al-Shabaab bombmaker in Somalia.
In November, reports circulating from Mogadishu indicated that a CIA officer had been killed in the country.
The circumstances leading to his death were never corroborated though.
However, security sources in the East African nation can now confirm that the officer was killed together with four Somali National Army (SNA) officers.
At the time, they were part of a team of military and intelligence personnel carrying out a raid to arrest a bombmaker associated with the Al-Shabaab militia.
The bombmaker had reportedly been part of the group of militants who killed an American soldier in Kenya in 2019.
Last month’s raid took place at Gendershe, a coastal village located roughly 30 miles to the southwest of the nation’s capital city.
The CIA officer and the four SNA soldiers died when Al-Shabaab militants detonated a car bomb a few minutes after the raid started.