Somali Rebels Deny Threatening to Attack Nairobi

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Somalia's hardline al Shabaab rebels denied Friday they had threatened to attack Kenya following a crackdown on Somalis in its capital Nairobi, and said a recording posted on the internet was a fake.

Renewed fears over the insurgents' links with Yemen and al Qaeda, and an attack on the home of a Danish cartoonist by an axe-wielding Somali man with reported ties to al Shabaab, have focussed attention on the militant group.

A recording posted online said the threat was composed by militants angered by Kenya's decision to deport a Jamaican Islamic cleric and the deaths of protesters in Nairobi who took to the streets a week ago to demonstrate against the move.

But al Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage told Reuters by telephone the group had not posted the recording.

"We didn't threaten Kenya. That story is a false one. We never posted that on the internet ... Everything needs to be checked first by the media to make sure they know what they are writing about," Rage said.

Al Shabaab, which Washington says is al Qaeda's proxy in the failed Horn of Africa state, has verbally threatened to attack Kenya in the past. But anger has been rising among the Somali community in recent days after Kenyan security forces detained hundreds of Somalis living in a Nairobi suburb.

Al Shabaab has also threatened to launch attacks inside Ethiopia -- as well as Uganda and Burundi because they have peacekeeping troops in Somalia -- but has yet to follow through.

"Al Shabaab is not a homogeneous organisation that has the same stance on certain issues," Afyare Abdi Elmi, a Somali political science professor at Qatar University, told Reuters.

"NO CAPACITY TO HIT NAIROBI"

"One wing may want to launch attacks in the region, and others do not have an opinion or do not agree ... They do not have the capacity to hit Nairobi, but these new threats plus their cooperation with the Yemeni al Qaeda shows their international stance and that their mission is no longer local."

Al Shabaab denied carrying out a suicide bombing at a university graduation ceremony in Mogadishu in December that killed 22 people, including three government ministers.

But few Somalis believed them, and the U.N. envoy to Somalia said it was "outrageous" to blame anyone else for that attack.

Kenya was hit by al Qaeda-linked strikes in 1998 and 2002 and security alerts were issued warning of possible attacks by Somalis on upmarket shopping malls in the capital last year.

In the online recording, men chanted in Swahili: "God willing we will arrive in Nairobi, we will enter Nairobi, God willing we will enter ... when we arrive we will hit, hit until we kill, weapons we have, praise be to God, they are enough."

But Rage told Reuters that the rebel group, which is fighting Somalia's Western-backed government and wants to impose its harsh version of sharia law across that country, had no idea who was responsible for uploading it to the internet.

And he said that al Shabaab's reclusive leader Ahmed Abdi Godane -- also known as Sheik Mukhtar Abdirahman Abu Zubeyr -- had not spoken to the media in the last three months.

"So how did he threaten to Kenya?" the spokesman asked.

The Kenyan police crackdown followed the violent protest against the detention of Jamaican cleric Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal, who was jailed in Britain for urging his audiences to kill Jews, Hindus and Westerners.

Many of the marchers were Somalis and some waved a black flag identified with al Shabaab. Thursday, Kenya said it had deported Faisal to Jamaica aboard a private Gulfstream jet.