Site of Kenyan Attacks Is Busy Port for Illegal Arms

For more than 500 years, this city on the Indian Ocean has been a key entrepot to the Middle East, with traders moving large volumes of everything from ivory and spices to human cargo.

But in recent times, Mombasa has also become a popular port for traffickers smuggling illegal firearms to armies fighting civil wars in the continent.

So it came as little surprise to many people here when authorities revealed that someone standing in a grassy canyon near the Mombasa airport fired two missiles at a chartered Israeli airliner carrying 271 people Thursday. The missiles streaked just past the plane.

A few minutes later, three suicide bombers attacked a Mombasa hotel catering to Israeli tourists, killing three Israelis and 10 Kenyans -- including one male victim discovered Saturday.

Virtually anyone can slip contraband, including weapons, into Kenya simply by bribing customs officers or senior government officials, according to police officers and dockworkers.

For the last several years, the U.S. government has been spending millions of dollars to improve security at airports in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa. But Thursday’s attacks demonstrated that lax security remains a problem.

On Saturday, the U.S. government warned Americans that they could be targets of terrorist actions in East Africa. The State Department said it had received information, the credibility of which had not been confirmed, that attacks might occur in Djibouti, which lies north of Kenya and borders Somalia and Ethiopia.

The Pentagon is establishing a command center in Djibouti as it boosts the number of U.S. troops in the Horn of Africa from 800 to 1,200 to help its campaign against terrorism.

Also Saturday, the State Department repeated its warning against Americans traveling to Yemen, across the Red Sea from Djibouti.

Meanwhile, authorities here continued to hunt for clues that could lead them to the planners of the suicide bombing and the people who fired the missiles.

The investigation, however, appeared to be foundering. Police released a Florida woman and her Spanish husband who were among 12 people detained following the blast.

Alicia Kalhammer, 31, of Tallahassee, Fla., said she had come for a “nostalgic” trip to Kenya with her husband, Jose Tena, 26. As a girl, Kalhammer lived in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, with her parents, who were U.S. diplomats.

Police detained Kalhammer and Tena as they checked out of a nearby resort shortly after the blast leveled the Paradise hotel.

“We told [the police] we had nothing to do with this,” Kalhammer said as she and Tena emerged from a cell where they spent more than 48 hours. “We’d like a shower and a beer.”

Some or all of the 10 other detainees -- six Pakistanis and four Somalis -- could be released soon. The men were seized from a motorized dhow, or wooden boat, that had docked for repairs at the old Mombasa port.

“We searched the boat and found nothing,” Lawrence Rotich, a senior security official at the port, told the German Press Agency.

Kenya’s internal security minister, Julius Sunkuli, sought to assure reporters Saturday that local police are capable of spearheading the probe.

“The Kenyan police do have the know-how and do have the resources to be able to unravel a terror offense,” Sunkuli said.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has deployed his Mossad intelligence agency to investigate the attack.

As investigators searched for clues, the bombing and attempted attack on the plane have focused attention on this ancient port city, the center of Kenya’s Muslim minority and a favored settling place for immigrants from Yemen, Somalia and other neighboring nations.

Much of central and East Africa depends on Mombasa, the region’s largest port, for their imports of food, fuel and other goods.

But in recent years, top Kenyan officials acknowledge, the port has become a major channel for illegal weapons and is now notorious for bribery and kickbacks.

When U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick visited Kenya this year, local businessmen complained to him that the price they pay to move goods from Mombasa to Nairobi is far more than what they pay to have the same items shipped from Asia to Mombasa.

On Friday, dockworkers here said Mossad investigators need not look far for answers as to how the shoulder-fired missiles or the explosives that ruined the Paradise hotel entered Mombasa.

Kenya shares a porous border with Somalia, which has been ruled by rival warlords since President Siad Barre was overthrown more than a decade ago.

And paying kitu kidogo -- Swahili for “a little something” -- to Kenyan customs officials here to clear weapons or goods is routine.

“In Kenya, with $50 you could [bring in enough explosives] to bomb the whole country,” one dockworker said.

“It’s all because we’re poor,” said a port security officer, who asked that his name not be used. “If you get paid less than $100 a month [like most police and custom officials do], and someone offers to give you a few thousand shillings to look the other way, you will do it.”

Last year, the United Nations helped Kenya set up a program known as the Africa Sea Ports Projects to combat weapons and drug smuggling through Mombasa and other parts of the nation.

But at a recent training seminar for customs officers, a senior government official said many customs officials were simply not capable of stopping the importation of illegal weapons.

“At times, officers at control points do not understand the items they are supposed to prevent from entering the country,” said S.L. Mpesha, head of the Central Firearms Bureau.

Much of the illegal weapons that enter Kenya -- and flow to Sudan, Congo and other African countries -- come on dhows, which for centuries have plied trade routes from India to Mombasa to countries in North Africa and the Persian Gulf.

“They are the ideal smuggling craft because some of them could dock in water only 18 inches deep,” said Esmond Martin, who wrote a book on the illegal trade carried out with Indian Ocean dhows. “If dhows stopped smuggling, more than half would be on the beach the next day.”

Thursday’s attack was not the first indication that danger was afoot in Mombasa. Australia had warned its citizens, in a Nov. 12 advisory, to defer travel to the city because of intelligence information about possible attacks against Western interests. However, Australia said it had no specific information about where or when an attack was planned.

Previously, suicide bombers exposed Kenya’s vulnerability to terrorism in 1998, when men linked to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing more than 200 people.

That year, the United States initiated its so-called Safe Skies for Africa Initiative to improve security at airports across the continent. Last month, U.S. officials furnished three Kenyan airports with new X-ray machines, walk-through metal detectors and explosive-trace detectors worth about $750,000.

But many agree that trying to close security gaps could be an endless task in Kenya and other parts of Africa.

“You can try your best,” said one Western diplomat. “But when you think about it, an airport security officer who looks the other way or a man in a dhow could cause a lot of trouble.”