From Jonathan Clayton in Mombasa

WESTERN intelligence agencies have identified Somalia as the most likely source of two Sam-7 missiles fired at the Israeli-chartered jet minutes after it left Mombasa airport last Thursday. It was also the main entry point into Kenya of the suicide bombers of the Hotel Paradise.

“Those types of Chinese-made Sams are easily purchased in Mogadishu and the rest of southern Somalia.

It is virtually certain they came from there,” Moustafa Hassouna, an authority on the threat posed by terrorist groups in East Africa, said.

Dr Hassouna, an Egyptian who advises the United Nations on regional security issues, and others said that al-Qaeda had maintained a robust network in the Horn of Africa since the 1998 bombing of the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, which killed more than 200 people.

“Some come in under the guise of refugees, others just slip over the border somewhere. There are so many ways in. I can’t see how the Kenyan police could possibly control it,” he said.

With its level of poverty, several regional conflicts, open borders and corrupt and inefficient governments, experts have long given warning that East Africa could become a “terror centre”. Camps of impoverished refugees in remote areas provide the perfect breeding grounds for terrorists.

Dr Hassouna believes that the missiles missed the aircraft carrying 260 Israeli holidaymakers home only because they had been poorly maintained. “This was a very close-run thing indeed and shows a high degree of planning and organisation,” he said.

Somalia is a collapsed state with no effective central government since 1991. It has a long border with Kenya, which is used by Arab refugees, a long, unguarded coastline and more than 100 remote landing strips.

Washington is pointing the finger again at Al-Ittihad al-Islamiya (Unity of Islam), a shadowy group that appeared in the country in the late 1980s and gained strength and notoriety in the 1990s after the collapse of the rule of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

Some experts say that the group, which was financed from Saudi Arabia, effectively splintered and broke up several years ago. Others maintain that its members have merely gone to ground.

“They are still around and they have links with other groups, that is sure,” a US regional security expert said. “But they are not stupid, they do not go around wearing beards and running training camps.”

After the 1998 bombings, the FBI found that many of the suspects came to Kenya from Somalia and that there was a strong extreme Islamic network. It was told that arms came into Kenya with lobster shipments from Somalia. Last week, a dhow was stopped on entering the port of Mombasa from Mogadishu. It was said to have contained seven Pakistanis and Arabs, all of whom had bought Somali passports a few weeks earlier.

Given such incidents and the presence in the country since September 11 of British, American and Israeli intelligence agents, several analysts have questioned why more efforts were not made in recent months to head off a possible attack.

Kenyan police increased suspicions of incompetence this week by arresting an American citizen and her Spanish husband on suspicion of involvement in the attacks and holding them for two days simply because they checked out of a hotel eight miles away a few minutes after the attack.

-- Anonymous, December 01, 2002