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The August 1998 bombings of Afghanistan and Sudan (codenamed Operation Infinite Reach) were American cruise missile strikes on al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan on August 20, 1998. The attack was in retaliation for the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which killed 224 people (including 12 Americans) and injured 5,000 others. ==Al-Shifa plant bombing and controversy== (詳細はRed Sea at about 01:30 EDT (17:30 GMT). Thirteen missiles hit the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory, which the United States claimed was helping Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the embassy attacks, build chemical weapons. One night watchman was killed and ten others were wounded in Sudan by the strike. Richard Clarke, the United States National Security Council advisor at the time of the strikes, stated that intelligence existed linking bin Laden to Al-Shifa's current and past operators, namely the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan. Since 1995, the CIA had received intelligence suggesting collaboration between Sudan and bin Laden to produce chemical weapons "to use against U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia". According to testimony by U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen, "...the U.S. intelligence community obtained physical evidence from outside the al-Shifa facility in Sudan that supported long-standing concerns regarding its potential role in Sudanese chemical weapon efforts that could be exploited by al Qaeda." Cohen also stated that "multiple, reinforcing elements of information... () information from HUMINT and technical sources" backed the intelligence community's view that the al-Shifa plant was linked to terrorism. The CIA had obtained a sample of soil from the facility which showed the presence of EMPTA, "a chemical that was essential in making the extremely potent nerve gas VX." An August 4 CIA intelligence report suggested that bin Laden "had already acquired chemical weapons and might be ready to attack." Officials later acknowledged, however, that "the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed... there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980's." The Al-Shifa factory employed 300 Sudanese and provided over half of the country's pharmaceuticals, including "drugs for treating malaria, diabetes, hypertension, ulcers, rheumatism, gonorrhea, and tuberculosis." Werner Daum, Germany's ambassador to Sudan from 1996 to 2000, wrote that the attack may have caused "several tens of thousands" of Sudanese civilian deaths due to the resulting shortage of these "basic medicines." The American Bureau of Intelligence and Research wrote a report in 1999 questioning the attack on the factory, suggesting that the connection to bin Laden was not accurate; James Risen reported in ''The New York Times'':
The Chairman of El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries, who is critical of the Sudanese government, more recently told reporters, "I had inventories of every chemical and records of every employee's history. There were no such (gas ) chemicals being made here." Sudan has since invited the U.S. to conduct chemical tests at the site for evidence to support its claim that the plant might have been a chemical weapons factory; so far, the U.S. has refused the invitation to investigate and has refused to officially apologize for the attacks.〔 Lawrence Wright hypothesized that "the chemical () might have been a product of the breakdown of a commercially available pesticide widely used in Africa, which it closely resembles." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cruise missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan (August 1998)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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