A foreign fighter and two top Somali militants were present in a house that was attacked over the weekend by US special forces, a Shebab commander told AFP Monday.

Moalim Abdirahman Abu-Isa, a commander for the Al Qaeda-linked Islamist group in the southern port town of Barawe, said one Shebab militant was killed but that several US Navy SEALS were believed to have been wounded.

"Three mujahedeen fighters, one of them a non-Somali brother, stayed in the house when it was attacked but they have shown incredible bravery and resisted the enemy," Abu-Isa said.

"They have shot several of the enemy and one of the mujahedeen fighters was blessed with martyrdom," he added, without giving further details of the militants' identities.

A witness in the area reported seeing a light skinned fighter with a flowing beard later leave the house protected by gunmen, while the dead body of the Shebab who had been killed was carried away.

According to a US official in Washington, the SEALs were hunting Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadir, a Kenyan of Somali origin who also goes by the alias Ikrima.

The Kenyan is linked with two Al-Qaeda operatives, now dead, who played roles in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the official said.

The strike in Somalia follows last month's attack -- claimed by the Shebab -- against an upscale shopping mall in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, in which 67 people were killed.

But Shebab spokesman Abdulaziz Abu Musab tried to downplay the report, saying the man Washington was hunting does not exist.

"That is a false name, they are looking for someone that is not real," he told AFP.

"There were no foreign fighters or commanders in Barawe when they attacked... only a unit of coast guards, and they bravely fought off the attack."

Musab had also earlier claimed British and Turkish forces had carried out the raid, before Washington said its forces were responsible.

Barawe lies some 180 kilometres (110 miles) south of the capital Mogadishu, and is one of the few ports left in Shebab hands, although they still control large parts of rural southern Somalia.

A United Nations monitoring report on Somalia released in July named the port as a Shebab training centre, specialising in preparing suicide attack squads.