Deadly attacks a year ago on an Israeli-owned resort hotel and airliner in Kenya were organized by al-Qaeda fighters armed and trained in neighboring Somalia, a draft UN report said on Tuesday.
At least four suspects remain in the chaotic east African state, and "additional weapons may have since been imported into Somalia solely for the purpose of carrying out further terrorist attacks in neighboring states," said the report.
The document was written by an expert panel investigating arms smuggling into Somalia in violation of a 1992 UN embargo and will soon be presented to the UN Security Council.
The panel did not identify the suspects it said were hiding out in Somalia after participating in the Nov. 28 attacks last year in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa. It blamed the attacks on an East African cell of the al-Qaeda network.
Most of Somalia has been a lawless patchwork of small and occasionally warring fiefdoms since 1991, when rival warlords ousted President Siad Barre.
Talks aimed at installing a new national government, which have dragged on in Kenya over the past year, represent the 14th attempt to restore peace to the Horn of Africa country.
The US has warned that Somalia could become a haven for al-Qaeda fighters seeking a new refuge after being chased out of Afghanistan, where Washington said they planned the Sept. 11, 2001, quadruple hijack attack on the US that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Fifteen people died in the attack on the Mombasa hotel, including an unknown number of suicide bombers. The attempt to bring down the Israeli airliner failed when two shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles missed their target.
"The terrorists responsible for the bombing of the Paradise Hotel in 2002 in Mombasa and the attempted attack on Flight 582 from Mombasa to Tel Aviv brought missiles from Yemen via Somalia to Kenya," according to the draft report.
"The panel has determined that it remains relatively easy to obtain surface-to-air missiles and import them to Somalia," the report said.
The experts said al-Qaeda's East African network began to regroup in Somalia in 1998, after carrying out deadly bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
Leading the group was Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a national of the Indian Ocean island chain of Comoros, who has been accused of organizing the embassy bombings as well as the Mombasa attacks, according to the expert panel.
Group members first underwent ideological orientation and small-arms training and then selected their targets and procured the needed weapons, including a pair of "Strela 2" surface-to-air missiles made in the Soviet Union in 1978.
The missiles, along with launchers produced in Bulgaria in 1993, were smuggled into Somalia from Yemen and then smuggled into Kenya by sea in August last year, the panel concluded.
The al-Qaeda cell divided into four groups to carry out the attacks, with Fazul leading the team responsible for shooting down the airliner, according to the report.
But both missiles "failed to reach their target."
Within a few days, the surviving members of the cell regrouped and headed back to Somalia by boat.
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