Somali-American man, missing for months, killed in Somalia

(CNN) - Jamal Bana was only 1 when his parents left Somalia and eventually brought him to the United States.

The oldest of seven children, Bana was a top student at Washburn High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was studying engineering at two area colleges before he went missing in November.

On Saturday, his family learned of his fate: a photo of his body appeared on a Web site, a casualty of the ongoing conflict in Somalia.

Bana is the third Somali-American from Minneapolis to head to Somalia and die there. His is one of more than a dozen missing Somali-American men whose families believe have gone back to fight alongside an al Qaeda-linked Islamist insurgency.

Now, Bana's family want to know who is responsible for recruiting him to join an Islamist insurgency in Somalia led by the group al-Shabaab.

"Someone must have put something in his mind," Omar Jamal of Minneapolis' Somali Justice Advocacy Center said at a Sunday news conference with Bana's family. "He must have been somewhat disillusioned and indoctrinated because he didn't have any clue about Somalia at all. So someone somewhere must be responsible for his disappearance."

Jamal spoke for the family with one arm around Bana's distraught mother, who quietly wept, covering her face with her headscarf. He father was too upset to attend the news conference, Jamal said. The family is asking the United States government to help them bring his body back home

The same day as the family's news conference, Somalia's president - a former member of the Islamist movement himself - issued a plea to Somali-Americans not to join the fight in his country.