New al-Qaida plot in Kenya reported
Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2003 11:47 am
NAIROBI, Kenya, Oct. 24 — Al-Qaida operatives planned to destroy the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in June with a truck bomb and a hijacked airplane loaded with explosives, according to a Kenyan police report seen Friday by The Associated Press.
THE REPORT, based on an interrogation of a terror suspect, could explain why the U.S. Embassy was closed June 20-24 and why Kenyan officials banned flights from June 20 to July 8 to and from Somalia, a lawless neighbor and suspected haven for terrorists.
Those actions suggest some knowledge of the plot by U.S. and Kenyan authorities, who have been on alert to terror threats since the 1998 car bombing of the old U.S. Embassy in downtown Nairobi, which killed 219 people, including 12 Americans.
Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida — the Islamic terror group that carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States — claimed responsibility for the embassy attack, as well as for the deadly bombing of a Kenyan hotel north of Mombasa in 2002. The suspect who described the plot to attack the embassy in June, Salmin Mohammed Khamis, is among six men whose murder trial begins Monday in the hotel attack.
A source close to the trial provided the AP with the police report of Khamis’ alleged account, taken hours after his June 17 arrest.
A Kenyan prosecutor would not comment on the plot but confirmed the existence of 164 statements from witnesses and investigators submitted for the trial.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF PLOT
In the police report, Khamis, 27, a Kenyan, does not comment on the hotel attack, which killed 13 people including three Israelis. Instead, he gives an insider’s account of the embassy plot, for which he has not been charged.
The interrogation started with Khamis’ deciphering a coded e-mail message from Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a key suspect in the hotel bombing who remains at large.
The e-mail “invited” Khamis to participate in “al-Qaida activities.”
Next, Khamis told interrogators, he attended a meeting of al-Qaida operatives in May in the coastal town of Malindi. Nabhan was there, as were two unidentified Somalis and an unidentified Arab.
Together, the men hatched the plot to attack the embassy and “took an oath binding them together [in] secrecy,” the police statement said.
Khamis’ job was to drive a truck from Mombasa to Nairobi. Once there, he was to load the truck with explosives assembled in a house in the Eastleigh neighborhood, home to thousands of Somalis.
“From Eastleigh, the suspect was to drive the motor vehicle from the place to the U.S. Embassy with his friends on board, to carry [out] the suicide mission of the bombing of the embassy,” the police report said.
Meanwhile, Nabhan and a second group were to charter a small plane at Nairobi’s Wilson Airport.
Their pretense was that they were heading to Somalia with a payload of khat, a mild stimulant grown in Kenya and chewed by many Somalis. Instead, they planned “to load a bomb called ‘jumbo’ and hijack the plane [and] bomb the U.S. Embassy simultaneously with the first group,” the report said.
THE REPORT, based on an interrogation of a terror suspect, could explain why the U.S. Embassy was closed June 20-24 and why Kenyan officials banned flights from June 20 to July 8 to and from Somalia, a lawless neighbor and suspected haven for terrorists.
Those actions suggest some knowledge of the plot by U.S. and Kenyan authorities, who have been on alert to terror threats since the 1998 car bombing of the old U.S. Embassy in downtown Nairobi, which killed 219 people, including 12 Americans.
Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida — the Islamic terror group that carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States — claimed responsibility for the embassy attack, as well as for the deadly bombing of a Kenyan hotel north of Mombasa in 2002. The suspect who described the plot to attack the embassy in June, Salmin Mohammed Khamis, is among six men whose murder trial begins Monday in the hotel attack.
A source close to the trial provided the AP with the police report of Khamis’ alleged account, taken hours after his June 17 arrest.
A Kenyan prosecutor would not comment on the plot but confirmed the existence of 164 statements from witnesses and investigators submitted for the trial.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF PLOT
In the police report, Khamis, 27, a Kenyan, does not comment on the hotel attack, which killed 13 people including three Israelis. Instead, he gives an insider’s account of the embassy plot, for which he has not been charged.
The interrogation started with Khamis’ deciphering a coded e-mail message from Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a key suspect in the hotel bombing who remains at large.
The e-mail “invited” Khamis to participate in “al-Qaida activities.”
Next, Khamis told interrogators, he attended a meeting of al-Qaida operatives in May in the coastal town of Malindi. Nabhan was there, as were two unidentified Somalis and an unidentified Arab.
Together, the men hatched the plot to attack the embassy and “took an oath binding them together [in] secrecy,” the police statement said.
Khamis’ job was to drive a truck from Mombasa to Nairobi. Once there, he was to load the truck with explosives assembled in a house in the Eastleigh neighborhood, home to thousands of Somalis.
“From Eastleigh, the suspect was to drive the motor vehicle from the place to the U.S. Embassy with his friends on board, to carry [out] the suicide mission of the bombing of the embassy,” the police report said.
Meanwhile, Nabhan and a second group were to charter a small plane at Nairobi’s Wilson Airport.
Their pretense was that they were heading to Somalia with a payload of khat, a mild stimulant grown in Kenya and chewed by many Somalis. Instead, they planned “to load a bomb called ‘jumbo’ and hijack the plane [and] bomb the U.S. Embassy simultaneously with the first group,” the report said.