FBI begins probe into Uganda terrorist bombings

NAIROBI/KAMPALA - Experts from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were in Uganda Wednesday to help probe weekend bombings by a Somali terror group that killed 76 people.

The three-member FBI team arrived from Nairobi the previous evening to help police gather evidence and analyze the explosives used, the Daily Monitor reported Wednesday, citing a spokeswoman from the US embassy.

Dozens were also injured in the explosion at a sports club and an Ethiopian restaurant in the capital Kampala late Sunday. The dead and injured were mostly football fans who had gathered to watch the World Cup final.

Somalia’s radical Islamist Al-Shabaab movement, which is fighting a bloody insurgency in its own country and says it has links to Al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the attack the next day.

The insurgents have been issuing threats of regional terror attacks for months, and said further attacks on Uganda and Burundi could follow if they do not withdraw their combined force of 5,000 African Union (AU) peacekeepers from Somalia.

The Daily Monitor quoted intelligence sources as saying that five suspects from three other African countries have since been arrested.

None of them speak English, the official language in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. A police spokesman said Tuesday that leads from within the Somali community in Kampala had led to the arrests.

Government spokesman Fred Opolot on Wednesday said that there could be links to neighbouring Kenya, where hundreds of thousands of Somalis live in the Dadaab refugee camp and the Nairobi district of Eastleigh.

Opolot said Kenyan authorities had handed over a Somali residing in Kenya, who is suspected of being an al-Shabaab member.

Nairobi, and the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam, were the sites of simultaneous bombing of US embassies in 1998, which claimed over 200 lives and marked the arrival of Al Qaeda on the world stage. dpa czy bve mat ml dms