Pakistan Hands Over Bomb Suspect
As east Africans prayed Sunday morning for victims of the terrorist bombing, Pakistan handed over a suspect in connection with the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. CBS News Correspondent Vicki Mabrey reports.
The Pakistani Foreign Ministry said Sunday that the suspect, identified as Mohammad Sadik Howaida, was arrested and interrogated soon after his arrival from Nairobi at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, on Aug. 7 -- the day of the nearly simultaneous bombings that killed 257 people in both countries.
The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad refused immediate comment. On Saturday, U.S. authorities in Washington had said CIA agents were headed to Pakistan to question the man.
The Foreign Ministry statement identified Howaida as an "Arab national," a phrase in Pakistan that usually means someone from anywhere in the Middle East.
A government source, who insisted on anonymity, told The Associated Press that investigators suspected a link between Howaida and Saudi multimillionaire Osama bin Laden, who has been living in neighboring Afghanistan for the last two years. U.S. officials say bin Laden, a vocal critic of the United States who has been among the world's most militant sponsors of terrorism, was a possible suspect in the African bombings.
The source said U.S. investigators who traveled to Karachi were denied access to Howaida. Pakistani officials carried out the interrogation and decided to fly him to Nairobi on a Pakistani plane and turn him over to Kenyan instead of to U.S. authorities, the source said. The U.S. investigators followed on another plane, he said.
When Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani later convicted in the United States of killing two CIA employees, was arrested in Pakistan last June in a joint FBI-Pakistani operation, angry Pakistanis accused their government of groveling before U.S. power.
Pakistani newspapers, who had identified the suspect by a slightly different name, Mohammed Sadique, had reported he was detained in Pakistan as he tried to slip into neighboring Afghanistan.
The national newspaper The News, quoting unnamed government sources Sunday, said the suspect confessed to planning the bombings. The News said he had received help in Kenya from sympathizers with connections to Egypt's Islamic Jihad organization.
Several groups use the name Islamic Jihad, or Islamic Holy War. Before the bombings, a group known as the Islamic Jihad considered the successor to the groups that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, reportedly vowed to strike America interests because some of its members were arrested in Albania.
The government source said the suspect was detained at first because immigration officials noticed he did not match his passport photograph. When he tried to bribe the officials, he was arrested, the newspaper said.
The source said Howaida told his interrogators several conspirators who left Naiobi a few days before him had already passed through Pakistan into Afghanistan, as he had planned to do.
In Kenya Sunday, nearly every congregation has been touched by the tragedy, losing members or the relatives of members. From the pulpits there was condemnation of the bombings in east Africa and Saturday's deadly blast in Northern Ireland.
More than a week after the tragedy here, grief remains fresh, as each day dozens more victims are buried in their homes and villages.
It is the Kenyans who suffered most from a bombing almost certainly not aimed at them, and despite the world's sympathy, Kenyans know they will have to rely on their own spiritual resources to get them through.