Kenya reluctantly handed over key evidence in the suicide bombing of a Mombasa tourist hotel to Israeli investigators yesterday, and released the bodies of three of the 16 dead to their families for burial.
Israel said it seemed increasingly likely that al-Qaeda was behind the attack and the firing shortly before of two surface-to-air missiles at an Israeli charter plane over Mombasa which failed to find their target.
“The suspicion that al-Qaeda was involved is growing stronger, although there is no concrete evidence,” Shaul Mofaz, the defence minister, reportedly told the Israeli cabinet.
After much criticism over their handling of the investigation, Kenyan police looked jubilant yesterday as they exhibited two fragments of the bomb and a few shards of the car used to ram it into the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel.
“These are parts of a welded gas cylinder,” said Charles Juma, a Kenyan explosives expert, laying out the blackened metal splinters beside the hotel’s wreckage. “Of course, it is part of the bomb.”
Israeli and Kenyan investigators were later overheard arguing about who would take possession of the evidence, with Mr Juma asserting that “none of this evidence is going back to Israel. This evidence is our responsibility”.
Kenyan police said later that the Israeli detectives would be allowed to help themselves to the remains of the bomb, which killed 10 Kenyans, three Israeli tourists and the three suicide bombers.
Yesterday, three of the Kenyan dead were buried after local officials bowed to media pressure and waived a mortuary fee that their families had been unable to pay. They were close relatives: Safari and his brother Charo, leaders of a traditional dance troupe, and their niece, Rizikizio, the hotel’s receptionist.
As the bodies came home to Maweni village, bouncing down a rutted pathway in a pick-up truck, more than 1,000 people streamed from the thick bush. Women sobbed and howled in grief. The local politician who paid for the pick-up gave a brief address.
Then the coffins were taken on a grand tour through the bush.
The body of Safari, a devout Muslim, was carried separately from his two pagan relatives; and his grave was dug some distance apart.
Beside it, in the hut where they were rearing eight children, Safari’s widow, Dama, lay heavily pregnant, and in purdah. “I am overcome with grief. In all our years together we never had one disagreement,” she whispered, from behind a grubby sheet. Above her, two of Safari’s goatskin drums and a feather head-dress – the tools of his trade – hung from a peg in the mud wall.
“When elephants fight, it is always the grass and the insects that suffer most. Safari died like that: because he was a small man in the wrong place.”
A previously unknown Palestinian militant group has claimed responsibility for the two attacks. But the ingenuity and meticulous planning that must have gone into them point strongly to al-Qaeda, Kenyan, American and Israeli intelligence sources all say.
Last night the US Democratic senator Bob Graham confirmed reports that US officials think they were the work of al-Itihaad al-Islamiyah.
“It’s a Somali-Kenyan group that’s been in operation for about 10 years, with loose affiliations with al-Qaeda,” he told Fox News.
Israeli officials are circulating the names of Ahmed Khalfan Gailani, a Tanzanian, and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a Kenyan; both wanted in connection with the 1998 bomb ing of the US embassy in Nairobi, which cost more than 200 lives.
Shortly after the attacks, Kenyan police rounded up around 20 suspects. But several have since been released and the evidence against the rest is scant at best.
On Saturday, a Spanish citizen and his American wife were released after police conceded that they were in fact backpackers, whose single sus picious move had been to check out of another Israeli-owned hotel shortly after hearing the bomb explode.
That left 10 men — six Pakistanis and four Somalis — as prime suspects. They had arrived together by dhow from Mogadishu — where the 1998 embassy bomb was probably assembled — and were arrested on Friday. One Kenyan police officer admitted that they had been under close surveillance since docking in Mombasa on Monday.
Yesterday Mir Mohammed, a Pakistani member of the crew who had been left aboard, claimed they were shark fishermen driven to land when their boat sprung a leak.