KUWAIT CITY (AP) — Authorities were interrogating a Kuwaiti man on Sunday who confessed to being a senior al-Qaida member, having links to the bombing of the USS Cole two years ago and plotting to blow up a Yemeni hotel frequented by Americans.
A Kuwaiti Interior Ministry official identified the man as 21-year-old Mohsen al-Fadhli.
The official refused to provide any details about al-Fadhli, other than to confirm newspaper reports surrounding his arrest two weeks ago. Word emerged Saturday in Kuwaiti newspapers.
Al-Watan daily said the man had "direct links" to planning the Oct. 6 attack on the French oil tanker Limburg off the Yemeni coast, in which a Bulgarian crew member was killed and 90,000 barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Aden.
The newspaper said al-Fadhli told police the attacker, al-Qaida's Shihab al-Yemeni, filled his boat with explosives and went out to sea looking for a target. It was "pure coincidence" that he chose the Limburg.
Al-Fadhli also confessed he had ties to the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, which killed 17 American sailors, the report said without elaborating.
A U.S. Embassy official in Kuwait refused to comment on al-Fadhli's arrest.
Kuwait, a key U.S. ally, still is trying to overcome last month's killing of a U.S. Marine by two Kuwaiti Islamic militants. Kuwait owes its liberation from a seven-month Iraqi occupation to a U.S.-led coalition during the 1991 Gulf War.
Independent lawmaker Mussalam al-Barrak said an al-Qaida presence in Kuwait does not reflect any substantive "antagonism against the United States." Militant extremists are few and they "are not widely welcomed by Kuwaitis," he added.
