The Foreign Office warns that terrorists may be in the final stages of planning attacks in Kenya, advising Britons to be “extra vigilant”.
Kenya‘s efforts to drive Somali al-Shabaab militants from ther border have already seen revenge attacks on Kenyan soil from the al-Qaida linked group. Kenyan authorities have stepped up their security to counter potential reprisal attacks but the Foreign Office has previously warned travellers to avoid the area.
The UK Foreign Office said today that Kenyan officials have alerted it to a heightened threat from terrorist attacks in Nairobi. However, British authorities believe the whole of Kenya is at risk.
The Foreign Office said in a statement: “Attacks could be indiscriminate and target Kenyan institutions as well as places where expatriates and foreign travellers gather, such as hotels, shopping centres and beaches. We strongly advise British Nationals to exercise extra vigilance and caution in public places and at public events.”
According to the French press agency AFP, Kenyan fighter jets killed at least 60 Islamist Shabaab insurgents in southern Somalia yesterday, in the latest air strike on insurgent positions.
Kenyan army spokesman Colonel Cyrus Oguna (pictured) told AFP: “Provisional casualties that Al-Shabaab lost 60 or more fighters and more than 50 were injured.”
Conflict in 2012 - the likely hotspots
The Foreign Office declined to comment on what triggered the high alert, other than that it was acting on intelligence from Kenyan officials.
The Foreign Office advises Britons against all but essential travel to within 60 kilometres of the Somali border, to coastal areas within 150km of the Kenya-Somalia border (which includes Lamu), to Garissa district and to low income areas of Nairobi, including all township or slum areas.
There were two attacks by armed gangs in small boats against beach resorts in the Lamu area in September and October last year.
The Foreign Office continues to warn Britons of the “high threat” of kidnapping in the areas to which it advises against all but essential travel.
“Westerners have previously been the target of kidnaps and further attacks are likely,” it cautioned.
Britain has close ties with Kenya, which it ruled as a colony until independence in 1963. London’s Metropolitan Police sent a counter terrorism team to Kenya last month to assist with investigations into a Briton suspected of planning an attack.
Nairobi police chief Anthony Kibuchi was quoted by a local paper on Friday as saying there had been new threats of attacks in the capital by al Qaeda, with which al Shabaab is allied.
But when contacted by Reuters after Britain’s warning, he said there was no new, specific threat against Nairobi.
“The statement I gave is ‘normal alerts’,” he told Reuters.
“We just want to be very alert because our Kenya Defence Forces are doing a very good job in Somalia. Now the sympathisers of al Shabaab are like a wounded buffalo, very dangerous. I was just asking members of the public to be extra alert.”
Deputy Police Spokesman Charles Owino said the force had been on heightened alert ever since the war on al Shabaab started, because of the potential for reprisal attacks.
Security forces said they had foiled attacks in Kenya over the holidays, through pre-emptive strikes inside Somalia and the killing of three heavily armed militants who were trying to land at Kiunga, near the border, from skiffs on New Year’s Eve.
Since Kenyan forces moved into Somalia, at least 30 people, including several policemen, have been killed in attacks by suspected militants in the northeastern Kenyan districts of Wajir, Mandera and Garissa.
Another person was killed in a grenade attack in Nairobi.
In 2010, 174,051 British nationals visited Kenya, and in the year to the end of March 2011 81 of them required consular assistance.