Evidence against men tried in the bombing of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 shows that al-Qaeda has made eastern Africa an important base.
According to documents submitted by prosecutors in the trial of the four men tied to the bombings of the US embassies in Africa, al-Qaeda trained Somalis who killed 18 US soldiers on a UN peacekeeping mission in 1993.
al-Qaeda, headed by Osama bin Laden, attacked the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 last year, killing more than 3 000 people.
In 1994, bin Laden was residing in Sudan and sent his personal secretary to Kenya with instructions to establish al-Qaeda in the region.
Once in Nairobi, the US citizen of Lebanese descent, Wadih el-Hage, described himself as a diamond dealer and used an African charitable aid organisation as a cover.
He met frequently with a Palestinian diamond dealer, Mustafa Ahmed, whom Tanzanian authorities would later accuse of taking part in the 1998 attack on the US embassy in Dar es Salaam.
In August 1994, another of the men tried in New York, Jordanian Mohamed Saddiq Odeh, was set up in Mombasa.
El-Hage attended his wedding and sent him on a mission to Somalia in 1997. In Mombasa, Odeh ran a fishing boat financed by al-Qaeda. One of bin Laden’s lieutenants, Mohammed Atef, killed in November 2001 during US operations in Afghanistan, delivered the start-up money to Mombasa, the indictment said.
By the end of 1997, el-Hage decided to return to the United States and settle in Texas but not without a trip to Afghanistan where he met with bin Laden and got orders to set up local networks in Kenya and Tanzania to prepare the 1998 attacks on the embassies, according to the indictment.
After the attacks, which killed 224 and wounded hundreds more, el-Hage, whom the FBI had long suspected had ties with al-Qaeda, was arrested.
He was sentenced in to life in prison in October 2002, along with Odeh and two others, Saudi Mohamed Rashid Daoud al-Owhali and Tanzanian Khalfan Khamis Mohamed. – Sapa-AFP