A specific al-Qaeda terrorist threat against British planes to Nairobi led to the suspension of flights between the UK and Kenya, the east African country’s national security minister said yesterday.
The Department for Transport in London took the unprecedented step of stopping all British flights between the two countries indefinitely on Thursday after the threat level to UK civil aviation was raised to ”imminent”.
In another development the Foreign Office last night upgraded its travel advice to warn of a ”clear terrorist threat” in six neighbouring east African countries.
A Foreign Office statement said new advice covering Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda would warn that each is ”one of a number of countries in east Africa where there is a clear terrorist threat. It is a reflection of our continuing concern about terrorism in the region.”
A source told the Guardian there was no evidence that attacks were imminent in any of the six countries on the list.
Earlier yesterday British ministers refused to reveal the intelligence behind the decision to ban flights to Kenya, but Chris Murungaru, the Kenyan security minister, told a press conference: ”It’s a specific al-Qaeda threat to British interests. The threat was more specifically on British Airways flights to Nairobi.”
The tourism minister, Raphael Tuju, said the threat specifically targeted British civil aviation, either charter flights or BA, and that Thursday was the most likely day for an attack.
Earlier the Home Office minister Mike O’Brien said intelligence reports from Kenya had made the government ”extremely worried”, but he refused to be drawn on the specific threat.
In Nairobi, Edward Clay, the high commissioner, met Murungaru and agreed that the two countries would start joint surveillance of Kenyan airports.
Clay said intelligence that the al-Qaeda suspect Fazul Abdullah Mohammed had returned to Kenya was linked to the decision to suspend flights. Mohammed is believed to have been behind the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in which 224 people died and last year’s attempt to shoot down a plane carrying Israeli tourists from a holiday resort near Mombasa.
”It’s simply one factor in a wave of recent reporting on this theme which, in the wake of the Riyadh events, give us serious concern,” Clay told the BBC, referring to Monday’s suicide bomb blasts in the Saudi Arabian capital, which killed 34 people.
Clay said even though the Kenyan security minister had criticised the ban as an overreaction, he recognised that the threat of attack was great. ”We are the biggest sender of tourists to this country. It’s a disappointment to us too,” he said.
David Blunkett, the home secretary, told Sky News: ”These are the kind of things I’m afraid we’re going to have to live with. We will try to balance the provision of advice to safeguard individuals with the continuance of the world economy … which if affected too badly, does the work of the terrorists for them.”
Kenyan Airways said it may lay on extra planes between Nairobi and London. – Guardian Unlimited Â