Al-Qaida targeted U.S. embassy in Kenya, suspect says

NAIROBI, Kenya - Al-Qaida operatives planned to destroy the U.S. embassy in Nairobi in June with a truck bomb and a hijacked plane loaded with explosives, a plot described in a Kenya police report seen by the Associated Press on Friday.

The report, based on an interrogation of a terror suspect, could explain why the U.S. embassy was closed June 20-24 and why Kenyan officials banned flights from June 20 to July 8 to and from Somalia, a suspected haven for terrorists.

Those actions suggest some knowledge of the plot by U.S. and Kenyan authorities, on alert to terror threats since the 1998 car bombing of the old U.S. embassy in downtown Nairobi, which killed 219 people including 12 Americans.

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the embassy attack as well as the deadly bombing of a Kenyan hotel north of Mombasa in 2002. The suspect who described the plot to attack the embassy in June, Salmin Mohammed Khamis, is among six men whose murder trial begins Monday in the hotel attack.

The Associated Press reports that an unnamed source close to the trial provided it with the police report of Khamis's account, taken hours after his June 17 arrest.

Khamis' job was to drive a truck from Mombasa to Nairobi. Once there, he was to load the truck with explosives assembled in a house in the Eastleigh neighborhood, home to thousands of Somalis.

"From Eastleigh, the suspect was to drive the motor vehicle from the place to the U.S. embassy with his friends on board, to carry (out) the suicide mission of the bombing of the embassy," the police report said.

Meanwhile, a second group was to charter a small plane at Nairobi's Wilson Airport. The pretense was they were heading to Somalia with a payload of "khat," a mild stimulant grown in Kenya and chewed by many Somalis. Instead, they planned "to load a bomb called "jumbo' and hijack the plane (and) bomb the U.S. embassy simultaneously with the first group," the report said.

TERROR ALERT FOR SAUDI ARABIA: Britain's Foreign Office said Friday it thought that "terrorists may be in the final phases of planning attacks" in Saudi Arabia.

The Foreign Office gave no details about its information, but said its warning against all but essential travel in Saudi Arabia remained in place.

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