Kenyan police said on Tuesday they had arrested three people following a suspected suicide bombing the day before that killed at least one person and wounded dozens in the capital, Nairobi.
The rush-hour explosion on Monday occurred a few hundred metres from where a truck bomb ripped through the former US embassy in 1998, killing 213 people in an attack claimed by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.
”Police are holding three people for interrogation,” police spokesperson Eric Kiraithe told a press conference.
”The investigators have not established the kind of explosives that were used … debris has been collected from the scene and it’s undergoing analysis,” he added.
Police and aid officials told Agence France-Presse they believed Monday’s blast in front of a restaurant near the Ambassadeur Hotel in central Nairobi was carried out by a suicide bomber, who was the only fatality.
More than 40 people were injured.
Kiraithe said the dead person was an African man in his mid 30s, but declined to confirm whether the explosion was a suicide attack.
”We are still carrying out our investigations,” he said.
Kenya has been on alert since January when the government said suspected Islamist militia, accused of links to extremist groups, had crossed into Kenya after being ousted from power in neighbouring Somalia.
The same month, the United States also warned its citizens in Kenya of possible reprisals by terrorist groups.
East Africa has seen several al-Qaeda-linked terrorist attacks in recent years, including the near-simultaneous bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, killing a total of 224 people and injuring 5 000.
Al-Qaeda-affiliated attackers bombed an Israeli-owned resort hotel near Mombasa in November 2002, killing 15 civilians and three presumed suicide bombers, and unsuccessfully attempted to shoot down an Israeli airliner there on the same day. — AFP
