The Sunday Times - World

December 01, 2002

Jon Swain, Mombasa, and Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv

AS SOON as he had been informed of last Thursday’s terrorist attacks in Kenya, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, summoned Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, to a meeting that promises to have momentous consequences for the conduct of the war on terror.

“War has been declared on the state of Israel by the global Islamic terror syndicate,” Sharon told Israel’s top anti-terrorist expert. “Change your priorities and get them one by one.”

Sharon’s blunt order on the day of his re-election to the leadership of his right-wing Likud party compelled Mossad — the institute for intelligence and special operations — to resort to counter-measures that it has not taken for 30 years.

According to a well informed source, the service has alerted sleeper agents in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to hunt down the planners of the attacks on an Israeli-owned tourist hotel and an Israeli passenger plane at Mombasa. Codenamed “Warriors”, these highly trained agents who volunteer to live under cover in Arab countries normally remain dormant except in wartime, when their mission is to undermine Arab preparations for strikes against Israel.

The last time such a serious order was given was in 1972. Then the prime minister, Golda Meir, ordered Mossad to kill the Palestinians involved in the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

All but one were eliminated over six years. Dagan is a veteran of such operations and is reputed to have killed more than 30 Palestinian terrorists in Gaza during the 1970s.

Sharon’s equally forceful reaction last week illustrates how seriously he views the twin terror attacks in Mombasa. “This is a wake-up call from hell by Al-Qaeda,” said an Israeli government official sent to Kenya to fly out victims.

The Israelis have little doubt that the attacks are the first by Osama Bin Laden’s organisation against the Jewish state. An unknown group, the Army of Palestine, claimed responsibility, and a possible link to a fundamentalist organisation such as Hezbollah has not been ruled out in Washington.

The detention of 12 suspects provided few clues. An American woman and her Spanish husband were released yesterday and Julius Sunkuli, Kenya’s minister of internal security, said no link had been found between Al-Qaeda and 10 other prisoners — six Pakistanis and four Somalis.

However, in the absence of any clear evidence to the contrary, Israel and Kenya both blamed Al-Qaeda. “The line connecting September 11 to Bali to Mombasa is a direct line,” said Gilad Milo, the Israeli official.

Two Mossad teams were sent to fortify the organisation’s Nairobi station and to pursue potential targets in east Africa.

Within Mossad, Israel’s dramatic entry into the war against Bin Laden had a mixed reception. “If Bin Laden was involved in the Kenya attack, this man is a walking corpse,” said one agent. “The price tag on Jewish blood is very high.”

Others criticised Mossad’s decision to activate the Warriors as “overkill”. One source said: “Muslim terrorism is not a critical threat to the state of Israel. We should keep these people for an all-out war.”

Time will doubtless tell whether Israel is squandering the most extraordinary weapon in its intelligence arsenal. None of the Israeli tourists who endured last week’s horrors think so, however. They believe that with the twin missile attack on the Arkia airliner and the suicide bombing of the Paradise hotel, the terrorists have crossed a new threshold.

To the hundreds of Israeli citizens visiting east Africa each week — and the thousands more who favour destinations from Turkey to Thailand — the devastation has shown their acute vulnerability.

THE last thing any of the 235 Israeli holidaymakers expected as they checked into the Paradise 15 miles up the coast from Mombasa on Thursday morning after a 5Å-hour overnight flight from Ben Gurion airport, Tel Aviv, was trouble. They thought they had left Israel’s nightmare world of suicide bombings behind and were looking forward to a week free from fear and anxiety.

The beach-front hotel was down a bumpy dirt road leading nowhere. The sea was a vivid blue. The Kenyans were welcoming and the hotel had seen no crime since a robbery some months before.

After opening two years ago under the direction of Yehuda Sulami, a wheelchair-bound Israeli, the Paradise catered exclusively for Israelis seeking inexpensive holidays in the sun.

The arrivals sang and laughed as they boarded buses at Mombasa airport to take them to the fully booked 146-room hotel. The buses had just unloaded 261 Israelis at the end of their holiday.

Arkia flight IZ582, with the departing tourists aboard, took off for Israel as their compatriots were arriving at the Paradise. But just as the Boeing 757 lifted off, a white Pajero vehicle was seen cruising along the airport perimeter fence.

Two missiles streaked towards the plane when it was only 500ft up in the air. They were fired from a field 100 yards from a police booth and one flew over a wing, missing by an estimated 3ft.

Some experts have speculated that the jet was equipped with a device that emitted signals to send the missiles off-course. Such equipment is carried by some Israeli planes on sensitive routes.

The most likely explanation, however, seemed to be that the terrorists were using shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles that must travel more than 500ft to arm themselves. As a result the missiles sped by harmlessly.

While the homeward bound Israelis had a lucky escape, the new arrivals at the Paradise were about to be hit by three suicide bombers.

Justin Mundu, a security supervisor guarding the gate, had been on duty since 6am and had sent one of his staff to fetch a cup of tea. Then he noticed a dark-coloured Pajero pass the front of the hotel. A few minutes later it returned at speed.

He had just enough time to see that the three people inside were “Arab-looking types” when the vehicle accelerated and crashed through a wooden boom across the hotel entrance and careered towards the crowded lobby. One man jumped out, ran in among the tourists and blew himself up. The car exploded in a fireball which engulfed the hotel.

Amid the fire, smoke and screams, Israeli and Kenyan survivors staggered towards the beach shrieking for water. Some had gaping wounds. The bombers’ vehicle had disintegrated in a smoking crater. Charred bodies lay in the lobby and scattered on the ground outside were human body parts — a hand here, a skull like a burnt cobblestone there.

Two of the three Israelis killed were Dvir Anter, 14, and his brother Noy, 12. Their mother Ora was critically injured and their eight-year-old sister Edva suffered burns to her hands. One of the enduring images of the horror is of their father Rahamin wailing in grief as he searched for his daughter.

Two sisters — Rachel Dadash, 9, and Meyrav Dadash, 15 — had just checked in and gone to their room with their father. Their mother was still in the lobby when the bombs exploded. “It felt like an earthquake,” they said. “The whole building shook and everything in the room fell on top of us.”

So began a 14-hour ordeal for the children. Taken first to another hotel and then to the airport, they knew their mother had been badly hurt but had no idea which hospital she was in or whether she was still alive.

Sharon sent his personal jet and four Israeli army transport planes to bring home the survivors. Desperately the girls waited at the airport as each ambulance arrived with more casualties for the flights.

They kept jumping up to the windows to see if their mother was there. Each time they were disappointed. Finally she arrived on the last ambulance, her head swathed in bandages, accompanied by her husband who had gone to find her.

Two male drummers and three women dancers of the local Griama dance troupe, who had gone to perform at the Paradise from their village half a mile away, were dead in the lobby. Safari Yaa, 55, leader and creator of the troupe, had said goodbye to his wife Aysha, who is eight months pregnant. “He left with a kiss, saying he would be back later with money to feed our babies and that was the last time I saw him,” she wept.

Aysha has four children. She was so poor that she could not afford to hire two young men to dig her husband’s grave on Friday. “No matter how hard I try I cannot understand how other Muslims could do this to us,” she wailed. She, too, was a Muslim.

IF the atrocity was the handiwork of Al-Qaeda, then it has once again shown its ability to strike at soft civilian targets at will — despite a huge onslaught from America since the September 11 attacks last year.

Four years ago Kenya was shaken by Al-Qaeda’s attack on the American embassy in Nairobi. Some 219 people were killed. Twelve others died in a simultaneous attack in neighbouring Tanzania.

America and Israel both helped the pro-western Kenyan government of Daniel arap Moi to beef up its security. But four years later nobody appreciated that the beach resorts along the Indian Ocean coast were as vulnerable to attack as Bali had been seven weeks earlier. With the benefit of hindsight, some analysts believe that Israel has been surprisingly complacent.

The warning signals were there. The coast has many foreign visitors. British and German military aircraft use nearby air bases. American warships are often in port. There is a large Muslim community, part of which admires Bin Laden: a street in Mombasa was unofficially renamed in his honour. And the port is east Africa’s gateway to the Middle East.

America has made the Horn of Africa a recent focus of its vast anti-terrorist operations. It alleges links between Al-Qaeda and the Somali group called Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (Islamic Unity), which it suspects of having allowed Bin Laden’s terrorists to train for the embassy bombings.

The recent killing of a top Al-Qaeda operative in Yemen with a missile fired at his vehicle from an American drone plane was a further sign that this region may be the next anti-terror battleground — with obvious implications for the safety of western and Israeli citizens passing through.

However, the Israeli foreign ministry did not consider there to be a threat. No specific security advice had been issued. No cars were stopped as they approached the Paradise hotel and airport security was lax. But at the Safini mosque in the heart of Mombasa, Sheikh Abu Hamza, one of the imams, has publicly told Israelis to get out of Kenya. “Why should Kenya have relations with Jews?” he said, calling for the government to sever ties with Israel.

“This is our area, a Muslim area, so Kenya should have no relations with them. Those Kenyans who were killed in the bombing we feel sorry for. They are our people and we miss them. But we do not feel sorry for the Jews.” He berated Israel over the deaths of Palestinians on the West Bank.

It may be that Bin Laden has decided to make propaganda gains from the anger felt by many of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims over Israel’s repeated crackdowns on Palestinians. So far Israel has conspicuously stayed outside America’s war on terror; and President George W Bush has struggled to distance the American campaign from any link to the Palestinian question.

Some analysts believe that Bin Laden wants to provoke an Israeli military response that would discourage Arab governments from signing up to an American-led war against Iraq.

With Mossad now joining the war on terror and the hunt for Bin Laden, it remains to be seen whether the Al-Qaeda leader has pulled off a strategic masterstroke, or whether he has fatally miscalculated and sown the seeds of his own destruction.

-- Anonymous, December 01, 2002