Suspected bomb-making material seized in Uganda

KAMPALA (Reuters) - Ugandan police seized a package containing suspected bomb-making material from a bus that arrived in the capital Kampala from Kenya on Friday, an official from the Ugandan Revenue Authority (URA) said.
The package was seized at a customs point where buses arriving from neighbouring countries are checked by officials of the URA, whose headquarters were evacuated for several hours over the incident.
"A suspicious package was found that contained bomb-making material, items police thought could be used to make a bomb," URA spokesman Paul Kyeyune told Reuters. "The police have taken the items away for further examination."
Police spokesman Vincent Ssekate told Reuters that detectives had tracked the bus, acting on intelligence, before intercepting it at the customs point.
He confirmed that some items had been taken off the bus for examination and said police were questioning the bus driver. It was not yet clear where in Kenya the bus had come from.
Kampala was rocked by twin suicide blasts on July 11 that killed 79 people watching the World Cup final on television, the first such attacks on foreign soil by Somalia's al Shabaab militant group, which claims links to al Qaeda.
The bombings heightened the security threat in east Africa, a region viewed by the West as a fertile breeding ground for Islamist extremists.
Somali rebels have threatened to carry out more attacks until Uganda and Burundi withdraw their troops from an African Union force protecting the United Nations-backed interim government in Mogadishu.
Uganda last week dropped charges related to the July bombings against 18 people and remanded 17 others, including some Kenyans, in custody to face trial.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni last month became the first foreign head of state to visit Somalia's capital Mogadishu for almost 20 years. AFP