NAIROBI, Kenya, March 8 (UPI) -- A U.S. State Department travel warning for Kenya has sparked an angry response from the country's chief security official.
The warning, issued in early February, said "the department continues to recommend that private American citizens in Kenya evaluate their personal security situation in light of continuing terrorist threats and increasing incidents of violent crime.
"Terrorist acts may include suicide operations, bombings, attacks on civil aviation and attacks on maritime vessels in or near Kenyan ports," the advisory said.
It also warned of home invasions, carjackings and burglaries.
"The people who issued this advisory must be extremely malicious and ill-willed," Kenyan Internal Security Minister John Michuki said Wednesday, according to the Daily Nation.
Michuki said he had not seen the warning itself but read news accounts about it, and urged the United States to stop issuing such advisories since they hampered Kenya's development.
The newspaper report appeared to indicate a new warning, specifically mentioning a possible terrorist attempt to disrupt an international cross country race in the coastal city of Mombasa later this month. A search of the State Department Web site, however, showed no new advisory had been issued since the February one, and that the February document did not mention the race.
Crime, including home invasions, has been a perennial problem in Kenya, a decades-old ally of the United States that is heavily dependant on tourism. Al-Qaida terrorists blew up the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1998, killing more than 200 people. Terrorists also bombed an Israeli-owned resort hotel in Mombasa in 2002 and unsuccessfully tried to shoot down an Israeli passenger plane with shoulder-fired missiles.
Late last month Muslim activists along the coast had threatened to disrupt the cross-country race to protest Kenya's deportation to neighboring Somalia of persons suspected of having links to Somalia's Islamist militias.
Activists said the deportees were actually Kenyan citizens and not Somali refugees.
Government spokesman Alfred Mutua said Thursday security services were prepared for any eventuality during the race on March 24 and downplayed any terrorist threat.
