Islamic Plot to Bomb U.S. Embassy in Uganda Foiled, Officials Say

American intelligence officers helped foil a plot last week by Islamic extremists to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Uganda, the most serious in an array of recent threats against American installations around the world, U.S. government sources said.

Ugandan authorities alerted by the CIA have detained 20 suspects in the case, including the two alleged ringleaders, who were arrested last week when they tried to enter the country from Kenya. Those two men are believed to be associates of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, who is suspected of orchestrating last month’s bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

U.S. officials have investigated a flood of threats worldwide since the East Africa embassy bombings killed at least 260 people Aug. 7, especially after retaliatory U.S. cruise missile attacks two weeks later against targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. On Thursday, German police deployed more than 100 officers to seal off the area around the U.S. Consulate in Hamburg after receiving information from a “serious source” that a terrorist attack was imminent.

Sources in several U.S. agencies said the Uganda plot was the most dangerous uncovered to date, but they offered little evidence other than the arrests to indicate the seriousness of the threat or the extent of Bin Laden’s alleged involvement. The Kampala embassy has been closed out of concern for terrorism three times since the Aug 7. blasts, most recently Monday. It was reopened Thursday for limited business, officials said.

Local news reports have claimed that Ugandan security forces thwarted an earlier plan to bomb the Kampala embassy in coordination with the Aug. 7 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. And after Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni called U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to express support for the cruise missile attacks last month, at least 29 Ugandans were killed in bombings on three buses outside Kampala.

More than a dozen FBI agents worked with the Ugandan Anti-Terrorism Squad to unravel the recent plot, assisting in the arrests of 18 suspects in addition to the two alleged ringleaders. The other suspects include the imam of a Kampala mosque, the treasurer of a local soccer team, local businessmen, a 15-year-old boy and an aid worker. Those suspects have no apparent links to Bin Laden but are sympathetic to his anti-American beliefs, the sources said.

The House and Senate intelligence committees were briefed about the operation last week, the sources said. One American official suggested that U.S. intelligence also had helped avert other disasters. “That’s not the only one,” he said. “There have been other attacks foiled since the embassy bombings.”