Kenya travel advisory to stay
2003-06-13 08:05
Nairobi - The United States on Thursday maintained that a travel advisory warning its nationals against visiting Kenya will remain in force, despite the east African nation's commendable measures to beef up its security.
"The travel advisory will stay, until we are satisfied that everything is safe," US ambassador to Kenya Johnny Carson told journalists in Nairobi.
The state department earlier announced that the US embassy in Kenya would shut its doors to the public this week for a security check amid a "very real and continuing" threat of terrorism throughout east Africa.
Carson explained that the US government appreciates increased security measures taken buy Kenya, but it is yet to arrest people, presumably Kenyans, who have hosted extremists since the 1998 attacks of the US embassy in Nairobi.
"We appreciate the government has increased security measure, but so far, not a single person who has hosted extremists here has been arrested since 1998," when a car bomb ripped through the embassy building, killing 213 people, 12 of them Americans, Carson said.
Almost a simultaneous attack hit the US embassy in Dar el Salaam, killing 11 Tanzanians.
Since then, dozens of people suspected to have hosted the bombers and plotters, have been detained, but most of them were released on a prima facie legal technicality.
A car-bomb attack against an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa last November that killed 18 people prompted the United States to advise its nationals to avoid eastern Africa and Kenya in particular.
Many western nations have since followed suit, with Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark and Germany also issuing travel warnings, which Nairobi says have dampened the tourism sector, the mainstay of the almost collapsed Kenyan economy.
The latest string of advisories started on May 15, when Kenya warned that extremists were planning to stage an attack in the country.
Finance Minister David Mwiraria, while tabling the government budget for 2003/2004 in parliament, called for a lifting of the advisories, especially Britain's ban on its civil aviation from flying the Nairobi route, arguing that it offered a "bleak" future for the tourism sector.
The government estimates that the sector has suffered losses amounting to more than $208.3m.