Kenyan military plane crashes in Somalia, rebels say shot down
Thu Dec 4, 2014 6:26pm GMT
(Adds analyst comment, Kenyan denial of rebel claim)
NAIROBI/MOGADISHU Dec 4 (Reuters) - A Kenyan warplane crashed in southern
Somalia on Thursday, with the Kenyan military saying the crash was due to
technical problems while Somali rebels said they had shot it down with a
missile.
The aircraft, which had been on a combat mission, came down in the area of
the southern port city of Kismayu, where Kenyan troops are deployed as part
of an African Union peacekeeping force battling the Islamist rebel group al
Shabaab.
A spokesman for the Kenya Defence Force (KDF) said the pilot reported a
technical problem on returning from a combat mission at about 3 p.m. (1200
GMT) before he was forced to eject.
Al Shabaab said they had shot the plane down, however.
"We hit the Kenyan jet and downed it. It was bombing Bulaguduud town today,"
the rebels' spokesman for military operations, Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab,
told Reuters. He said the group used a missile and that the pilot was "burnt
inside."
Kenyan planes have often flown missions over Somalia since troops marched
across the border in 2011, but al Shabaab has not previously shown it could
target them with missiles.
"You can't rule out that they might have acquired a few, but it is not a
capability that they have demonstrated in a clear manner," said Mark
Schroeder, Africa analyst for consultancy Stratfor.
KDF spokesman Colonel David Obonyo denied the claim. "They don't have the
capability or the means to do that," he said. "This was a purely mechanical
failure, a technical problem."
Obonyo, who declined to give details about the type of aircraft except to
say it was a combat jet, said a search and rescue operation had been
launched for the pilot.
Kenyan troops recaptured Kismayu, a strategic port in the south of the
war-torn country, from al Shabaab rebels in 2012.
The report follows two attacks in two weeks by al Shabaab militants inside
Kenya's northern border region in which more than 60 non-Muslim Kenyan
civilians were killed.
Last year, a suspected U.S. reconnaissance drone crashed in southern
Somalia. A regional governor at the time said rebels had shot it down but
the rebels only confirmed the crash without saying they were responsible for
it.
The United States does not report about any such activities in Somalia.
(Reporting by Edmund Blair in Nairobi and Feisal Omar in Mogadishu; Editing
by Hugh Lawson)