Kenyan police said they were holding a dozen people yesterday over the twin bomb and missile attacks on Israeli tourists, after Israel vowed to hunt down all those behind the Mombasa bloodbath.
A man and woman detained in connection with Thursday's attacks had used US passports and said they were from Florida, the manager of a hotel where they stayed said. Police said they were hunting others of Arab appearance.
Suicide bombers drove a car into the lobby of the Israeli-owned Mombasa Paradise beach hotel and blew it up, killing 15 people, minutes after missiles were fired at a plane full of Israeli tourists taking off nearby early on Thursday.
By yesterday, 12 people had been detained. A police spokesman said the first three seized were "all foreigners". There was no confirmation of initial suspicions that the attacks were the work of al-Qaeda.
"Immediately after the incident we detained two for interrogation and I feel they could give us useful information," Police Commissioner Philemon Abong'o told a news conference.
"By this morning we had also detained a further 10 people who are under our custody because we feel that some of them have information which could be useful to us."
He declined to give the nationalities of those held.
Ben Wafula, general manager of Mombasa's Le Soleil Beach Club, said of the first two detained: "They had American passports and they said they were from Florida."
He said the man and the woman, who appeared in their 20s, checked into his hotel on Nov. 26 and had tried to check out on Thursday morning, about two hours after the suicide bombing of the Paradise Hotel some 5km away.
Wafula said the pair were held after his staff made a routine call to police, who had asked all hotels in the area to notify them of any people checking out following the blast. The couple had phoned Spain soon after the bomb blast, he added.
An Israeli air force plane flew home survivors and Israeli security experts rushed to Mombasa to examine the charred wreckage of the Paradise.
"If there is going to be an attack then this is the best place to be," said one young Israeli woman after landing at an Israeli air force base, then burst into tears.
"As we saw at the [1976] Entebbe rescue [of Israeli aircraft hijack victims] and in the airlifts of Ethiopian Jews, Israel takes care of its people when they're here or anywhere else," Foreign Ministry spokesman David Saranga said.
The plane also brought back the bodies of the three Israelis killed, two brothers aged 13 and 15, and a 61-year-old man. Among the other victims were Kenyan dancers who welcomed tourists in the hotel lobby.
"Our long arm will catch the attackers and those who dispatch them," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said on Thursday after his Likud party re-elected him as its leader ahead of Israel's Jan. 28 general election.
Israeli and Kenyan officials have been quick to blame Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network for the attack on the Paradise, which killed three Israelis, nine Kenyans and the three bombers. More than a dozen Israelis and more than 60 others were injured.
But the White House said it was too soon to blame the group it accuses of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks on the US last year and the 1998 truck bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in which 224 people died, most of them Africans.
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