A Kenyan police report based on an interrogation of a terror suspect showed that al-Qaida operatives planned to destroy the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in June with a truck bomb and a hijacked plane loaded with explosives. The report seen Friday by The Associated Press could explain why the U.S. Embassy was closed June 20-24 and why Kenyan officials banned flights from June 20-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, 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 attacks – claimed responsibility for the embassy attack as well as 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’s alleged account, taken hours after his June 17 arrest. Full Story
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