Target of SEAL Raid Planned Attacks in Kenya

The man U.S. Navy SEALs tried to take down in Somalia over the weekend was a Kenyan who had plotted to attack his country’s parliament building and the United Nations headquarters in Nairobi, according to a Kenyan government intelligence report.

The pre-dawn, seaside SEAL raid on Saturday targeted Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadir, who is also known as Ikrima, a U.S. official told The Associated Press. The U.S. troops are not believed to have captured or killed their target. The official insisted on anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to release the information

In the internal report by Kenya’s National Intelligence Service, Abdulkadir is listed as the lead planner of a plot sanctioned by al-Qaida’s core leadership in Pakistan to carry out multiple attacks in Kenya in late 2011 and early 2012. The AP has previously reported that those attacks, linked to the Somali Islamic extremist group al-Shabab, were disrupted.

The report, which was leaked to AP and other media in the wake of the Sept. 21 terror attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall that killed more than 60 people, lists Samantha Lewthwaite — a Briton known in British media as the “White Widow” — as one of several “key actors” in the plot to attack Parliament buildings, the U.N. Office in Nairobi, Kenyan Defense Forces camps and other targets. The plotters also intended to assassinate top Kenyan political and security officials, the report said.

Police disrupted that plot. Lewthwaite, who was married to one of the suicide bombers in the 2005 attack on London’s transit system, escaped capture when she produced a South African passport fraudulently obtained in another person’s name. Late last month Interpol, acting on a request from Kenya, issued an arrest notice for Lewthwaite.

The National Intelligence Service report, in an entry dated exactly one year before the Sept. 21 mall attack, said al-Shabab operatives were in Nairobi “and are planning to mount suicide attacks on undisclosed date, targeting Westgate Mall and Holy Family Basilica.” Two suspects were believed in possession of suicide vests, grenades and AK-47 assault rifles, the report said.

The report makes no mention of Abdulkadir in relation to the attack on Westgate Mall.

The SEAL raid in Somalia was only one of two anti-terror missions by U.S. forces in Africa over the weekend. In Libya on Saturday, the U.S. Army’s Delta Force captured Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaida leader linked to the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

This article appeared in print on page 8 of the October 8th, 2013 edition of Hamodia.