A magistrate on Friday dismissed a ”confession” from prosecution evidence in the trial of three Kenyans charged with plotting terror attacks in the country, a defence lawyer said.
Nairobi Chief Magistrate Aggrey Muchelule ”rejected the evidence, which implied that one of the accused confessed of plotting terrorism, on the basis that it was obtained against the Kenyan evidence act”, lawyer Maobe Mao said.
The court declared the evidence inadmissible because of last year’s changes in the Kenyan penal code that outlaw any sort of confession as evidence in criminal trials, a prosecutor said.
On Wednesday, Assistant Commissioner of Police John M’mbijjiwe presented a print-out of a coded e-mail that one of the accused, Salmin Mohammed Khamis, sent to Ali Saleh Nabhan Saleh, ”believed to be detailing plots of terrorism in Kenya”.
Kenyan police believe that Nabhan Saleh, who is still at large, was the chief planner of 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa.
”M’mbijjiwe told the court of his encounter with Khamis who translated the coded e-mails for him, confessing of a plot to hijack a plane from [Nairobi’s] Wilson airport, and blow up the United States embassy” in the capital’s outskirts, Mao said.
”The evidence was basically a confession,” Mao added.
The trial was adjourned to August 6.
Khamis, Mohammed Kubwa Seif and Said Saggar Ahmed are accused of plotting the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi in August 1998, when 213 people, including 12 US citizens, were killed.
The defendants are also charged with planning the November 28 2002 car-bombing of an Israeli-owned Mombasa Paradise hotel near the port city of Mombasa and the near-simultaneous attempt to shoot down a tourist jet bound for Israel, shortly after it took off from Mombasa airport.
They are not charged with the actual bombings.
Twelve Kenyans, three Israelis and three presumed bombers died in the hotel attack, which, along with the embassy bombing, were claimed by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda extremist network.
The three are also accused of conspiring to bomb the new US embassy in the outskirts of Nairobi between November 2002 and June last year — an attack that never took place.
In 2001 a court in New York passed life sentences on four al-Qaeda members found guilty of involvement in the 1998 embassy bombings. — Sapa-AFP