The FBI and Kenya's Criminal Investigations Department confirmed yesterday they had raided a Nairobi hotel on Tuesday in connection with the devastating bomb attack on the US embassy.
Earlier, the Daily Nation newspaper said two rooms in the Hilltop Hotel were used to assemble the bomb, which killed 247 people and wounded over 5,000 on August 7th. It said 15 FBI agents and six Nairobi detectives sealed off the hotel and conducted a 2 1/2 hour search. The newspaper carried a photograph of an FBI agent moving a box which it said contained "vital evidence".
"The two rooms were inspected for forensic evidence but it appeared that the bombers had swept clean any particles of the material used to make the bomb," the paper quoted a source as saying.
A staff member said: "They brought out several boxes and after we started work, they came back to pick up another cardboard box which they left behind."
He added that the manager had not turned up for work yesterday and staff believed he was still in police custody.
The co-manager of the hotel, Mr Khalid Saleh, told reporters that his partner had been taken in for questioning by police. He said the bomb could not have been built in the hotel, as cleaners entered occupied rooms every day. "They must have assembled it some place else. We'd have noticed."
The Daily Nation said Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, who was deported to Kenya from Pakistan in connection with the bomb, had confessed to masterminding the attack.
The paper said Odeh, a Palestinian, had booked into the hotel on August 4th to join three accomplices who had checked in the day before.
It said that on August 7th they completed the bomb in an enclosed pick-up truck which they drove across the city to the embassy.
"On August 7th, one of the four men who were in that hotel accompanied two other suicide bombers to the American embassy to launch the attack. We are sure that the three died in the blast," the paper's source was quoted as saying. Odeh's two other accomplices remain at large, the newspaper said.
A near-simultaneous car bomb attack outside the US embassy in Tanzania killed 10 people.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that two more suspects in the bombings of the US embassies have been arrested in Pakistan.
The men, a Saudi and a Sudanese - one of whom was described by unidentified Pakistani officials as a pivotal participant in the terrorist attacks - were arrested while trying to cross into Afghanistan.
Both had fake false passports.
One of the suspects is reported to have implicated the Saudi millionaire, Ossma bin Laden.
Danish police sealed off the US embassy in Copenhagen for an hour and a half yesterday after a bomb alert.