Kenya's Security Minister George Saitoti worries that this support could allow al-Shabaab to threaten East Africa, and especially Kenya, the region's economic hub.Non-Somali East Africans have taken part in al-Qaida attacks before, including the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the suicide bomb attack on an Israeli-owned hotel near Mombasa in 2002.