Embassy Bombers Tied to 2002 Kenya Attacks

Investigators have found evidence suggesting that some of the same Qaeda operatives involved in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam may have, five years later, helped carry out the attacks on two Israeli targets in Kenya last November. Although four members of Al Qaeda were convicted in 2001 in the embassy bombings conspiracy case, U.S. officials acknowledge that they never completely cracked the Qaeda cell that organized and carried out the attacks on the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. A total of 13 of the FBI’s 22 most wanted terrorists are suspects in the embassy bombings, which left 219 people dead. Some of them may have died in Afghanistan during the U.S.-led military campaign there, U.S. officials say. And at least two of them, investigators in Kenya suspect, may have been the suicide bombers who leveled the Paradise Hotel north of Mombasa on Nov. 28. “From the way things are unfolding, we think there’s a connection,” said one of the Kenyan investigators probing the Mombasa attacks. “There are many suspicious links between this one and that one back in 1998.” Al Qaeda has already taken responsibility for the hotel bombing and the nearly simultaneous attempt to down a charter aircraft taking tourists from the Mombasa airport back to Israel. The missile attack on the aircraft missed its mark but the hotel bombing killed 11 Kenyans, three Israelis and at least two bombers. Full Story