Mombasa explosion targeted crowded place and would have been largest attack

By PHILIP MWAKIO and WILLIS OKETCH

MOMBASA, KENYA: Intelligence officials have warned that two terror suspects detained in Mombasa were part of an 11-person Al-Qaeda-trained squad on a mission to commit a massive terror campaign in Kenya.

The suspected terrorists with a booby-trapped car had entered the country early this month.

They also believe Fuad Abubakar Manswab, a Kenyan fugitive from Mombasa who has links to the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular, is behind the alleged terror plot.

Fuad, who is facing terrorism charges in absentia alongside Briton Jermaine Grant, is said to have fled to Somalia after jumping bail about two years ago.  Fuad is believed to be staying in Yemen or the Gedo region of Somalia.

Yesterday police were seeking court permission to destroy the car in a controlled explosion, despite removing six pipe bombs and neutralising detonators and batteries attached to what has been described as one of the largest improvised explosive device find in Kenya in recent history.

A fresh search on the car yesterday yielded hundreds of pellets and bomblets welded inside the dashboard.

From the design of the booby-trapped car, it was projected that the terrorists were planning to launch either a suicide mission using the vehicle or cause a massive remote-controlled explosion.

According to experts, the explosion was to be launched in a basement or crowded place by either radio waves generated by a cellphone found in the car or electric current from the car’s battery.

MAXIMUM DAMAGE

The bomblets would then ignite secondary explosions and send pellets in all directions for maximum damage to human life.

The Standard learnt that all six pipe bombs recovered were filled with TNT or some unknown nitrates.

One bomb was welded onto the dashboard, two on the floor and three behind the back seat of the car and were all connected to the battery and steering wheel by cables and detonators in what anti-terror experts believe is a classic example of a suicide car assemblage. It was alleged that the assembly and design of the car resembles the vehicle believed to have been used in the terror attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Kilifi in 2002.

Yesterday evening Isaak Noor Ibrahim and Abdi Aziz Abdillahi Abdi were slapped with charges of possession of weapons and explosives as police sought a magistrate’s permission to destroy the car, which was initially expected to be an exhibit in the first case where the two were charged with possession of an unregistered car.

Both suspects, who are Kenyan, pleaded not guilty in the Somali language through an interpreter and were yet to get a lawyer by the time we went to Press.

Last evening, two students who had been arrested in Mombasa on Tuesday for alleged links with the suspects were set free without charges.

Police reported they intended to destroy the car in a quarry in Mtwapa, fearing that it could still contain explosive materials as yet unknown to conventional experts despite Tuesday’s efforts to disarm it.

“We are liaising with the courts to be granted permission to detonate the explosives as they are hazardous,” said Mombasa CID boss Henry Ondiek yesterday, adding that experts were looking for “a suitable location” to disable the explosives.

FAKE NUMBER PLATE

Officers told The Standard the registration number KAN 410E on the Toyota Hilux vehicle was initially registered under the name of someone who lives in Eldoret, raising the possibility that the plate was fake.

Mombasa County Police Commander Robert Kitur said: “According to the records, that number was issued to a vehicle whose owner has been traced to Eldoret and we are trying to find out if it was stolen.”

But experts involved in the search for clues disclosed they had received reliable information that the explosives in the car were most likely assembled at an undisclosed location inside Somalia and driven to Kenya through Mandera and Nairobi before being taken to Mombasa.

According to a senior intelligence official, the two suspects in police custody are members of an 11-person Al-Shabaab cell believed to have entered Kenya early this month.

“The intelligence we have shows that the two suspects were part of a team of 11 people who entered Kenya from Somalia. Some of the squad members went to Nairobi and some are believed to be in Mombasa,” said the official who cannot be named for security reasons.

Reports emerged that the plotters of what would have been one of the largest terrorist acts in Kenya in recent years planned a series of minor attacks using grenades and AK 47 rifles found in the car to distract police before launching a massive raid on shopping malls, beaches or tourist hotels with a car bomb.