Monday's raid on Al Shabaab militants in Somalia was carried out by United States Special Forces troops and killed a top al-Qaeda suspect, American newspapers reported Tuesday.

A Radio Garowe report on Monday said at least four people were killed when "unknown foreign army helicopters" attacked a vehicle in southern Somalia.

Garowe Online said sources close to Al Shabaab insurgents in Mogadishu had told the news agency that the group's local leader in the region, Sheikh Hussein Ali Fidow, was among the dead.

There was no official U.S. statement on the raid, but both the Washington Post and the New York Times on Tuesday quoted unnamed government officials as saying that U.S. forces had been responsible.

Both newspapers named the principal target of the raid as Saleh Ali Nabhan, a Kenyan held accountable for the bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel on the Kenyan coast in 2002. He was also variously said to be suspected of being involved in trying to shoot down an Israeli airliner and in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The Washington Post reported a senior U.S. military official as saying the raid was carried out by at least four helicopters operating from a U.S. naval vessel off the Somali coast, and that the troops who conducted it retrieved four bodies.

The New York Times described the raid as "an indication of the Obama administration's willingness to use combat troops strategically against Al Qaeda's growing influence in the region."