U.S. Embassy in Nairobi looks at longer closure

NAIROBI, Kenya -- The U.S. Embassy was closed at least through Tuesday, and air traffic between Kenya and neighboring Somalia was banned after the Pentagon raised the terrorism threat level in the country, Kenyan and embassy officials said.

The U.S. Embassy, which was shut down on Friday, will stay closed Monday and Tuesday, "and if necessary additional days thereafter," spokesman Tom Hart said. Hart said the closure was due to "new and concrete information concerning the continuing threat of terrorist activity in Kenya and East Africa."

Late Friday, civil aviation authorities banned all air traffic between Kenya and Somalia, a lawless country beset by clan warfare that has not had a central government since 1991. Somalia has been labeled as a haven for terrorists by Pentagon officials.

Henry Ochieng, a director at the civil aviation authority, said the ban is indefinite. It affects a Somali-owned commercial passenger airline, United Nations flights and dozens of small, private aircraft that ferry Kenyan-grown khat, a semi-narcotic leaf, to Somalia.

The U.S. Defense Department has alerted all U.S. interests in Kenya to a terrorist threat, officials said Friday. The Pentagon also raised the threat level in the East African nation to "high" based on information about a threat against a specific target, a defense official said on condition of anonymity. The warning, the highest of four levels, was issued Thursday.

The official said details of the warning, including the target and the nature of the threat, were classified secret.

Recent intelligence has raised fears of another attack in Kenya, which has been under a lower-level alert after 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Nairobi and Tanzania and Nov. 28 attacks on the Kenyan coast.

The embassy has been closed at least one day a week since May 15 when the U.S. State Department issued a beefed-up advisory for American citizens warning against all nonessential travel to the east African nation.

Kenyan Minister for Internal Security Chris Murungaru was in Washington Friday for talks with U.S. officials on the security situation.

Murungaru's deputy, Dave Mwangi, said Saturday that rumors that a car bomb had been assembled in Nairobi "have been around for two months ... We have combed Nairobi but haven't found anything."

Although no one will say so for the record, the target is believed to be the new, state-of-the-art, $68-million embassy that was inaugurated March 3 in a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Nairobi.

The four-story building is the first U.S. mission to be built from scratch since Congress authorized upgrades to diplomatic missions around the world after the August 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 231 people, including 12 Americans.

Bill Prior, the U.S. State Department construction manager for the project, said at the inauguration that the new embassy meets all security requirements.