Kenyan investigators reported on Sunday they have found the remains of at least one gas cylinder which they said was part of the bomb that blew up an Israeli-owned hotel.
It was the first time Kenyan investigators said they had identified components of the bomb that exploded on Thursday at the Paradise beach hotel, killing ten Kenyans, three Israelis and three presumed bombers.
With Israeli explosives experts standing by at the gutted hotel, the Kenyans held up before journalists two pieces of metal which investigator Charles Juma said were part of a ”welding gas cylinder.”
When asked if it was part of the explosive, Juma replied: ”Of course, it has something to do with the bomb.”
Another Kenyan investigator said it was not clear so far whether one or more cylinders were used. After a Kenyan investigator dropped the two pieces on the
ground, the two Israelis rushed to grab them from his hands and slip them into a transparent plastic bag which they immediately sealed.
Since the morning, Israeli experts had walked around scanning the debris that used to be the reception area of the hotel in Kikambala, a village about 25 kilometres north of the port of Mombasa.
Kenyan soldiers later joined the search of the site.
The bombing occurred, witnesses said, when three men who appeared to be Arabs slammed a four-wheel drive vehicle packed with explosives into the beach hotel just as a party of Israeli tourists was arriving.
Five minutes earlier, two missiles narrowly missed the Israeli charter plane that had brought the tourists here and was taking off from nearby Mombasa airport with tourists returning home to Tel Aviv.
Nobody was hurt in that attack. Hirsh Goodman, an Israeli defense specialist at Tel Aviv’s Jaffee Centre, theorised that the missiles were probably deflected by detection technology on board the Arkia plane.
Kenya’s lead investigator William Lang’at, who is a deputy police commissioner, said police were ”still searching for the Mitsubishi Pajero pieces scattered all around in order to reconstruct it.”
”We are (also) still looking for parts of the bodies of the terrorists. We have not done any DNA test yet,” he said.
A Kenyan farmer, who police believe met the bombers just before they attacked the hotel, sensed they did not want him looking inside their car where he nonetheless saw some 10 cell phones, the farmer’s wife said.
The farmer, Hamisi Haro, spoke to the driver and shook hands with the front-seat passenger, who both looked Arab, after they drove up to his farm early on Thursday, his wife Fatuma Misi told journalists.
Meanwhile, the Kenyan authorities said they were still holding for questioning six Pakistanis and four Somalis, who they said arrived here by boat last week from Somalia.
In Islamabad, Pakistan’s interior ministry representative Brigadier Javed Cheema said describing the men as Pakistanis was ”misleading as the identity of these individuals has not been established yet.”
A Somali businessman in Kenya said the Pakistanis received Somali passports when their firm in Mogadishu sent them on a trip to have their fishing boat repaired in Mombasa, some 1 000 kilometres away.
They set sail from Mogadishu on November 8, arriving in Mombasa on November 23, according to the Mombasa-based businessman, who says he has contacts with the workshops which did the repair work.
Kenyan officials said on Saturday they had not yet established any link between the 10 detainees and the attacks on the hotel and an airliner.
An American woman and her Spanish husband, also held for questioning after the hotel bombing, were freed on Saturday after police cleared them of any suspicion.
Kenyan, Israeli, US and other western officials have not ruled out that Osama bin Laden’s Islamic militant network al-Qaeda was involved in the bombing.
But the Kenyan authorities declined to comment on Saturday on a US official’s remarks that a Somali group, Al-Ittihad al-Islami (AIAI), with links to al-Qaeda, had been added to the possible list of suspects. – Sapa-AFP