By
The Associated Press
KUWAIT - Police yesterday announced the arrests of three Kuwaitis and seizure of a large quantity of explosives in an alleged plot that a local newspaper said was directed at U.S. targets in other countries.
The newspaper, Al-Qabas, said the arrested men had links to terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, Islamic fundamentalist scion of a millionaire Saudi family with ancestral roots in Yemen.
A fourth suspect was still at large, the Kuwaiti Interior Ministry said. The ministry's statement described him as "a citizen of a North African country" - an Arab swath that stretches from Morocco through Tunisia, Algeria and Libya to Egypt. The Ministry said he has been using a forged passport from an unidentified Gulf nation.
The United States has blamed bin Laden, who is thought to be holed up in a remote redoubt in Afghanistan, for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden is also a prime suspect as the mentor of last month's suicide boat-bomb attack on the USS Cole in Aden Harbor.
A Yemeni source close to the Cole investigation said yesterday that four "major players" in the attack that killed 17 American sailors had fled Yemen.
Other well-placed Yemeni sources said yesterday night that there was no connection between these four purported fugitives and the arrests in Kuwait. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity.
Bin Laden has long been reputed to keep his operatives separate from one another so that the arrest of one person or one cell would not expose other branches of his network. If the purported Kuwaiti plot and the USS Cole attack do have links to bin Laden, it seems unlikely that any bin Laden proteges involved in the Yemen attack would surface so soon in another operation in the region.
Kuwait's Interior Ministry did not say when it arrested the three Kuwaitis, who are being held on charges of planning terrorist attacks inside and outside Kuwait.
The ministry provided no details of their identities or their alleged plans but said they were found in possession of 293 pounds of high explosives and five hand grenades.
Kuwaiti newspapers, quoting unnamed sources, have reported for several days that the authorities had detained members of a terrorist group that allegedly included Kuwaiti police officers and other Arabs.
In the last few days, security has increased around buildings occupied by Westerners in Kuwait City. The United States currently has about 5,000 troops in Kuwait. In addition, about 8,000 American civilians - many of them in the oil industry - live in Kuwait.
U.S. forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were placed on highest alert last month for fear that more attacks would follow the Oct. 12 bombing of the USS Cole in
Yemen's deep-water harbor at the opposite end of the Arabian Peninsula from Kuwait.
In Yemen, the source close to the Cole investigation said the interrogation of more than 85 people detained for questioning showed that four main surviving suspects in the Aden Harbor bombing were no longer in the country.
The source did not identify the quartet, except to say that some of the four men were not Yemenis.
The Yemeni army has also been searching for a fifth man described as a suspected accomplice in the Cole bombing. The search, which started Tuesday in the Islamic Jihad stronghold of Lahej 22 miles north of Aden, failed to net the suspect, the Yemeni source said, refusing to be identified further.
Witnesses said yesterday that about 50 soldiers, armed with semiautomatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and riding in a convoy of seven jeeps, has searched the suspect's hometown of Gol Yamani on Lahej's outskirts.
Gol Yamani, a poor farming town of unpaved dirt lanes and about 500 inhabitants, has a reputation for being a haven for "Afghan Arabs" - young men who, like bin Laden, went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to help local Muslim guerrillas in their war against Soviet occupation troops.
The witnesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the active search was over but surveillance was being maintained in the area. They said the subject of the search escaped from an Aden prison two months after he was among those convicted in the 1992 bombings of two Aden hotels. The hotels were bombed to protest the presence of U.S. troops in Somalia, on the Horn of Africa across the Gulf of Aden.
