UN links Eritrea to Ethiopian terror plot
Mike Pflanz, London
July 30, 2011
NAIROBI: Eritrea has been accused of plotting co-ordinated car bombs designed to cause ''mass civilian casualties'' during an international conference in its neighbour and enemy Ethiopia in January.
The tiny Red Sea state is also allegedly bankrolling Somalia's pro-al-Qaeda Islamists and using British bank accounts to fund an increase in clandestine aggression across East Africa.
The claims were made in a new United Nations report that went on to warn of a rising threat of ''large scale'' terror attacks in Kenya and elsewhere in east Africa from freshly recruited jihadists.
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Three years of planning went into the plot to detonate a series of bombs in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, during an African Union summit in January. It was foiled by security forces.
Ethiopian rebels were blamed, but the plan was ''conceived, planned, supported and directed by the external operations directorate of the Government of Eritrea'', said the report, from the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea.
The anticipated mass civilian casualties and use of explosives to spread terror ''represent a qualitative shift in Eritrean tactics'', the report's authors said.
Eritrea won independence from Ethiopia in 1993 but the two countries soon plunged back into war. Eritrea has supported any armed group that opposes Ethiopia's government.
Proxy conflicts between the two enemies spread most recently to Somalia, where Ethiopia is the main regional backer of the internationally recognised administration in Mogadishu. Eritrea is now sending an average of $75,000 a month from its embassy in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, to agents of al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda-linked insurgents battling Somalia's government, the UN report said.
That money is transferred from Dubai, where there are significant investments of Eritrean government funds.
Because his country exports almost nothing, President Isaias Afewerki taxes the 1.2 million Eritreans living abroad 2 per cent of their income.
Through its diaspora tax, the report said the government of Eritrea was estimated to raise tens and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Some of that money is believed to end up being transferred via Dubai and Nairobi to pay al-Shabaab in Somalia.
''The means by which the leadership in Asmara [Eritrea's capital] apparently intends to pursue its objectives are no longer proportional or rational,'' the report stated. ''Moreover, since the Eritrean intelligence apparatus responsible for the African Union summit plot is also active in Kenya, Somalia, the Sudan and Uganda, the level of threat it poses to these other countries must be re-evaluated.''
Attempts to reach Eritrea's government spokesman were unsuccessful.
Telegraph, London
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