Witness: Plane buzzed hotel after bombing
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NAIROBI, Kenya (Reuters) -- A light aircraft flew over the burning ruins of an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya immediately after a suicide bomb attack killed 15 people at the resort, a witness told a Nairobi court on Wednesday.
Four Kenyans -- Mohammed Ali Saleh Nabhan, Omar Said Omar, Mohammed Kubwa and Aboud Rogo Mohammed -- are on trial for the murder of 12 Kenyans and three Israelis at the Paradise Hotel, north of the Indian Ocean coastal city of Mombasa.
"Immediately after the loud explosion, a plane flew low over the hotel and then out to sea where it disappeared completely," Meshak Oture Rianga, who was a plumber at the hotel, told the high court.
Rianga testified that he had seen two men filming the hotel grounds three months before the November 2002 attack, adding that they had looked suspicious. His testimony echoed similar comments made by another witness on Tuesday.
"It was not a normal incident. The men were facing their cameras up to the sky. It was suspicious," Rianga said.
The trial, which began last week, is expected to hear the testimonies of 145 witnesses.
The defendants are also charged with a failed attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner with a missile. Both attacks have been claimed by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Three other Kenyans went on trial last month in Nairobi on a lesser charge of conspiracy in the two Mombasa attacks and in a 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, which killed more than 200 people.
They also face a conspiracy charge in a failed plot to blow up the U.S. mission in Nairobi between November 2002 and June 2003. They deny all the charges.
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