Kenyan officials say no link between 12 people held over Thursday's attacks on Israelis and the al Qaeda network has been established.
US officials said yesterday the top suspect for the blast at the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in which 15 people including three attackers were killed was the Somali-based group Al-Itihad al-Islamiya, known also as AIAI or the Islamic Union.
They said it was a prominent radical Islamist group in the Horn of Africa and had links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.
Kenyan Internal Security Minister Julius Sunkuli confirmed that no link "so far" had been found between al Qaeda and those being held and a failed simultaneous attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner.
On Thursady, three suicide bombers smashed a jeep into the lobby of the Paradise Hotel and blew it up, killing 12 people - three of them Israelis - and wounding many more. Minutes earlier missiles were fired at a plane packed with Israeli tourists nearby.
Other victims included Kenyan dancers who had been welcoming tourists in the hotel lobby when the bomb went off.
The Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims (SUPKEM) condemned the attacks in Mombasa - a mostly Muslim city with links to the Arab world - and said those behind them were enemies of Islam.
"We would like to assure our enemies that Muslims in Kenya will continue to co-exist with other fellow Kenyans of other faiths as they have always done," SUPKEM Chairman Mr Abdughafur El-Busaidy was quoted in the East African Standard.
Israeli survivors were flown home on yesterday to tearful reunions in an Israeli air force plane, which also took back the bodies of the three Israelis killed, two brothers aged 13 and 15, and a 61-year-old man.
Israeli and US experts today continued to scoured the debris of the hotel and the wreckage of the suicide bombers' four-wheel drive but no new developemnts were reported.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw yesterday said there was no intelligence was available to the West that could have prevented the attacks, suggesting that an Australian warning two weeks ago of a possible terrorism risk in Kenya was not specific enough.
AFP