Kenya: Terror warning
2003-06-20 21:23
Washington - The United States closed its embassy in Kenya Friday after the Defence Intelligence Agency warned of a "possible, imminent" terrorist attack in the east African country, officials said.
The warning specified the target, the terrorist group and method of attack, said the defence official, who noted that Kenya already was at the highest alert level before the warning.
"The DIA issued a warning on Thursday of a possible, imminent attack in Kenya," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The thing we lack, as always, is timing."
The official would provide little information on the suspected plot or its target, but he said al-Qaeda operatives were in the region as were other terrorists groups that operate independently but receive support from al-Qaeda.
The "high" threat alert level assigned to Kenya means "terrorists are operating in the region, they use methods to produce large numbers of casualties, and also the operating environment favors them," the official said.
"This is like a tornado warning," he said "You've seen the funnel cloud so you put out the tornado warning."
On the method of attack, the official would say only, "We've seen it before in Africa."
The US embassy in Nairobi was destroyed in Auugst, 1998 in a car bomb attack blamed on al-Qaeda, a terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden.
The attack killed 213 people, 12 of them Americans. An almost simultaneous attack hit the US embassy in Dar el Salaam, killed 11 people.
A State Department spokesman, Philip Reeker, said: "The US embassy in Nairobi is completely closed today to review its security posture."
He said the embassy was expected to remain closed on Monday and Tuesday.
The new embassy has only been open a few months and has already been at the heart of several alerts. The embassy was closed for several hours on Tuesday following warnings of a possible attack.
Last month Kenya announced that intelligence reports showed extremists were planning attacks in the east African country. Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Germany and the United States warned their nationals against travelling to Kenya. Britain halted civil aviation flights to Nairobi.
A car-bomb attack against an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa last November killed 18 people. At the same time ground-to-air missile narrowly missed a charter jet carrying Israeli tourists.
"Those threats are still out there," said the State Department spokesperson.
"We continue working obviously with the Kenyan government, but with other governments in the region and all around the world to counter those threats, to do whatever we can to stop terrorism," he added.
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