KENYA: Tight security in Mombasa on eve of World Cross Country event

African athletes are expected to dominate as security is stepped up in Mombasa ahead of the World Cross Country championships. Athletes from around the world made last minutes preparations amidst tight security at the Kenyan coastal town of Mombasa, where the World Cross Country championships will be held on Saturday (March 24). Runners from more than 60 countries are expected to take part in the event with tight competition expected between the Kenyan and the Ethiopian teams. Ethiopia's five-time double world cross country champion Kenenisa Bekele a hot favourite to win a record sixth title at the world championships on Saturday. Kenyans Paul Tergat and John Ngugi are the only other athletes to have won the senior men's title five times. Tergat, the world marathon record holder, last won world cross country gold in 1999. For a country that dominated cross country for so long, Kenya will be disappoined not to win the senior men's title on their own turf. But Tergat is in no doubt that Bekele is the man to beat. "He (Beleke) has won five times already and most probably he will be going for the sixth straight record which I think is a motivation for him to come and compete here." Kenyans have not won any individual senior gold medal since Edith Masai's short course victory in 2004 in Brussels. World 10,000m bronze medallist Moses Mosop and national champion Richard Matelong are Kenya's best hopes of ending the drought. Bekele's compatriot Tirunesh Dibaba, who won the women's title last year in Fukuoka, Japan, is tipped to retain her title in the Indian Ocean port city. Other medal prospects are Eritrea's world half-marathon champion and 2005 world silver medallist Zersenay Tadesse and Qatar's Kenyan-born Abdullah Ahmad Hassan, who will lead the Gulf state in the absence of team mate Saif Saaeed Shaheen. Kenyan-born Lornah Kiplagat, who won silver medal last year in Japan wearing Dutch colours, aims to become the first European to win since Britain's Paula Radcliffe notched up her second success in Dublin five years ago. The event will be held amid heavy security after recent threats by Islamic groups to disrupt the competition. On the eve of the event their was a heightened prescence in Mombasa of armed paramilitary police at the venue and police boats patroling off the coast as teams practised. Kenya's Muslim leaders have cancelled protests aimed at disrupting the event, defusing a threat that had contributed to a travel warning by the United States. The leaders, who often accuse Kenya's authorities of discrimination, said it was clear the government cared more about the race than the rights of Muslims held unfairly in Kenya or deported to neighbouring Somalia. Kenya's Muslims -- between 7 and 15 percent of the mainly Christian country's 35 million people -- say they often face harassment, especially since bombings in 1998 and 2002 that were blamed on al Qaeda. In both cases, the United States issued a travel warning to its citizens saying Kenya was at risk from extremist attacks. The attacks hurt the tourist sector -- Kenya's top foreign exchange earner in 2006 at $810 million -- but it rebounded. The U.S. issued a warning earlier this month of an "unspecified" terror attack could be part of a U.S. "trend" of raising the spectre of al Qaeda in areas it saw as strategic, and then using proxies to carry out attacks it later blamed on Muslims. The U.S. warning said there was a threat of an attack in the port city by "alleged extremist elements" but gave no details. It said it was also aware of threats by Muslims to disrupt the championships "through unspecified means". Most of Kenya's Muslims live on the Indian Ocean coast.

ITN Source | March 24, 2007

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