Kenya Bombing Suspect Is Said to Have Fled to South Africa

STELLENBOSCH, South Africa —  The search for a man who played a key role in the deadly bombing of a hotel in Kenya last month has spread to South Africa, investigative sources say.

Saleh Nabhan, suspected of buying the sport utility vehicle that destroyed the Paradise hotel near Mombasa, Kenya, told relatives he wanted to go to South Africa and may have fled here after the Nov. 28 bombing that killed 10 Kenyans and three Israelis.

South African officials deny that Nabhan is in the country, but U.S. investigators say the Americans are checking. “All the investigative agencies here are involved in that and looking into the South African connection,” said one U.S. source.

Even before the attack in Kenya, South African and American intelligence sources had been discussing the possibility that South Africa has become a haven for terrorists.

An October issue paper published by the American Embassy in Pretoria noted, “South Africa has well-developed banking, communications and transportation infrastructures that make it attractive to domestic and international organized crime.”

The report went on to say that South Africa was being used as an international base for “smuggling drugs, laundering money, counterfeiting currency, falsifying the origin of goods to avoid tariffs and promoting corruption and terrorism. If left unchecked, international organized crime can destabilize the region.”

In interviews over the past month, American and South African officials said they were also concerned that South Africa’s porous borders and its large Muslim communities in the cities of Durban and Cape Town could create an ideal environment for terrorist operations.

These sources say that Al Qaeda members could be stopping off in neighboring countries with lax immigration controls such as Namibia, Mozambique, Swaziland or Lesotho before slipping into South Africa. This nation’s border with Zimbabwe has become particularly troublesome, according to a South African newspaper, the Sunday Independent, which reported that 84% of the people caught without documents at roadblocks in November were Zimbabweans.

According to one intelligence source, Malay Muslims in South Africa have for years arranged fictitious marriages for foreign family members in order to secure citizenship. That source said that American intelligence officials also have noticed the practice and are pressing South Africa to crack down on it.

South African Minister of Intelligence Lindiwe Sisulu said that South Africa has had trouble policing its borders, but she insisted that is not unusual in a period of increasing migration around the world. She said that recent legislation that requires all South Africans to hold identity cards will help keep out terrorists.

“If they were to marry South Africans, they would be subjecting themselves to being photographed ... and go through a legal process that would pick up any Al Qaeda. So that is not the kind of thing that they would do,” Sisulu said.

Sisulu was confident that even if terrorists attempted to set up operations in South Africa, intelligence agencies would stamp them out.

Last week, police here arrested five alleged white nationalists in connection with a series of bomb blasts in Johannesburg, the black township of Soweto and a suburb of Pretoria, the nation’s capital. The bombers targeted a mosque, a synagogue and commuter railways. Those five suspects will join 15 other white extremists on trial for allegedly conspiring to overthrow the state.

In 2001, South African agents broke the back of the militant Muslim group PAGAD, or People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, after its members allegedly detonated a dozen bombs in restaurants, synagogues and government buildings over a two-year period.

In a phone interview Monday, Mombasa bombing investigator William Langat, a deputy commissioner in Kenya’s national police force, said that Nabhan’s sister, brother and mother said that the suspect might be in South Africa.

“The mother, brother and sister are telling us that [Nabhan] had told them about three weeks back that he would go to South Africa to find a job,” Langat said. Nabhan was born in Mombasa in 1979, and his family still lives there.

Langat said the last confirmed sighting of Nabhan was on Dec. 2, four days after the attack near Mombasa.

“He was not very far from Mombasa, along the coastline, visiting some relative,” Langat said.