25 June 1999
(No reduction in commitment to world presence, Rubin says) (390) By Jane A. Morse USIA Diplomatic Correspondent Washington -- The United States has suspended operations at six of its embassies in African nations for three days because of information that these facilities have been "under surveillance by suspicious individuals," State Department Spokesman James Rubin announced June 25. The embassies affected are in Gambia, Togo, Madagascar, Liberia, Namibia and Senegal. They will be closed June 24 through June 27. Their status will be evaluated and a decision about reopening these embassies will be made on Monday, June 28, the spokesman said. All U.S. Embassies around the world have been placed an "a heightened status of alert due to increased security concerns," Rubin said. He noted that a number of U.S. Embassies in sub-Sahara Africa were closed December 17-18, 1998 because of the "heightened threat environment" following U.S. air strikes on Iraq. In addition, the U.S. Embassy in Uganda has been closed on a few occasions due to security following the August 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. U.S. Embassies in Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Congo-Brazzaville have been closed as a result of domestic political instability in those countries he said. The U.S. Embassy in Sudan, he noted, is open but operated by local employees only. Rubin declined to elaborate on the intelligence information garnered on the "suspicious individuals" involved in this latest round of U.S. Embassy closings. But he noted that "we have seen a pattern of activity indicating continued planning for terrorist attacks by members of Usama Bin Laden's network." Bin Laden has been indicted in the 1998 U.S.Embassy bombings in East Africa that killed 220 Americans, Tanzanians and Kenyans and injured another 5,000 people. "We take reporting of such threats seriously," Rubin explained, but he emphasized that taking precautions does not mean the United States is retreating from a full international diplomatic presence. Terrorists have not intimidated the United States, the spokesman said, "We have foiled their objectives of stopping our determination to have an American presence around the world and to interfere with our determination as a global power to have an American troop presence in various countries," he said. "We are not going to let these cowardly terrorists who kill innocent people achieve their objectives."