Word: mombasa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Israeli pilot Rafi Marek was 90 seconds into his flight from Mombasa, Kenya, at about 3,000 ft., when he felt an unexpected thump. He thought it was the impact of a bird hitting the fuselage of his Arkia charter Boeing 757 carrying 261 Israelis home from a beach vacation. But he wondered if something far more frightening might have been after his plane when crew members spotted two white stripes of smoke streaming past the jet's tail, only 100 yards away. Two shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles had just missed blowing up Marek's plane: the launcher...
...blast hit 18 miles away and five minutes later. Just as another group of Israelis arrived at the Paradise Hotel on the Indian Ocean, north of Mombasa, Three suicide bombers smashed an explosives-laden vehicle through the hotel gates into the front door. One man draped in a bomb belt leaped from the green Mitsubishi Pajero and blew himself up inside the lobby. His co-conspirators detonated the explosives packed in the vehicle, incinerating the car, themselves and the 160-room thatched-roof hotel within minutes. Amid the screams and billowing black smoke, three Israelis, including two small boys...
...years operating there. The government had done little to tighten security after the 1998 bomb blast that shattered the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, along with a twin assault in Tanzania. Porous borders with war-ravaged Somalia and Sudan made it easy to bring in surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). Mombasa has little in the way of immigration or passport controls, and the steamy seaside city is home to the most radical Muslims in the country. Australian intelligence picked up enough chatter about potential danger in Mombasa to issue a travel warning to its citizens...
...downside for the terrorists is that these soft assaults tally fewer casualties per incident, and they suggest that al-Qaeda can't mount big hits anymore. Yet the cumulative impact of the string of smaller strikes from Bali to Mombasa can be just as telling, making it appear that terrorists can hit anyone anywhere and the threat to the U.S. and its friends is global. Some experts worry too that the current taste for soft targets might be intended to divert attention while al-Qaeda prepares a spectacular attack...
...scariest aspect of Mombasa was that terrorists fired a simple, shoulder-launched SAM at a commercial airliner. For the first time, terrorists showed that they are able and ready to shoot down vulnerable civilian planes anywhere as they take off or land, when a heat-seeking missile can easily lock onto a plane's engine...