Flight ban lifted

The ban, imposed by the Kenyan government, on flights to and from Somalia was lifted on Tuesday. "The government has reassessed the situation and is satisfied that enough security measures have been put in place," Kenya's internal security minister, Chris Murungaru, said in a statement. Since the ban was imposed, the Kenyan government had put in place "appropriate security measures to ensure the safety of both passengers and cargo", he said. A spokesman in the Office of the President, Kaunda Douglas, told IRIN that new surveillance equipment had been purchased and that inspections of all cargo and passengers had been significantly increased. "If there were any oversights before, there is a much deeper scrutiny of what is going out and coming in," he said. He added that the Civil Aviation Authority had installed better surveillance to prevent any aircraft from landing illegally on air strips outside of the country's legitimate airports. The Kenyan government suspended all flights to and from Somalia on 19 June after the US warned of a possible imminent attack on its embassy in Nairobi. US ambassador Johnnie Carson said Kenya had not done enough to track down terrorist suspects. "The problem we see here, quite honestly, is that we believe there are al-Qaeda terrorists in Kenya and some of them are Kenyan citizens," Carson told Nation TV. International aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres said the ban was "severely hampering" the provision of humanitarian assistance to Somalia, most of which is transported by air from Wilson Airport in Nairobi.