Kenya bristled with anger at the weekend over a new US security clampdown at its Nairobi embassy which the east African country says is unnecessarily scaring away foreign tourists.

Citing an imminent threat of terror attacks, the US closed its embassy on Friday, prompting a angry rebuke from Kenya's government and media.

The warning of an imminent attack was "wrong and misleading," Security Minister Chris Murungaru said.

"They should know that New York is not any safer than Nairobi".

Yet only hours later, police said they had launched "a major anti-terrorism swoop" on a Nairobi suburb, detaining at least 38 people.

And Nairobi said yesterday it was banning flights to and from its neighbour Somalia indefinitely because of a terrorism threat.

Kenya has often accused Somalia, which has been ruled by rival warlords since 1991, of being responsible for the infiltration of arms into the country.

Tourism, one of Kenya's main foreign currency earners, has been hard-hit by recent attacks that have prompted many Western countries to issue travel warnings.

Once one of Africa's most popular destinations, Kenya has seen visitors dwindle since a car bombing at an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa killed 15 last November.

At the same time, an Israeli airliner was the aim of a missile attack at Nairobi airport.

The US embassy - whose previous premises were destroyed in a 1998 car bombing that killed 213 people - said it would remain closed at least until tomorrow, or longer if necessary.

The new top-security compound built next to the UN headquarters has already been the focus of several alerts since it opened a few months ago.

The decision to close it on Friday came after the US Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington had warned of "a possible, imminent attack in Kenya".

Last month, Kenya itself warned that intelligence reports suggested extremists were planning attacks in the country.

This prompted Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Germany and the US to warn their nationals against travelling there.

But minister Murungaru said Saturday Washington was overreacting.

"How does the US say that there is a threat in Kenya when European nations have already cleared Kenya as safe for visitors?" he said, reffering to the recent lifting of travel advisories by Belgium and Germany.

Yesterday's local newspapers were equally scathing.

The East African Standard pointedly accused the US and Britain, which has also suspended flights from and to Kenya - of "deliberately strangling Kenya's tourism industry and other businesses".

"The Americans and Britons are behaving like the visitor who seeks refuge in a house and then proceeds to warn other visitors, who have nothing to fear, not to set foot there lest they be targeted together with him," the paper said.

Under the headline "Americans are free to pack up and leave," the East African Standard said Washington's "phantasmal claims of impending terror attacks, which sound more hollow by the week, have themselves been inflicting more fear in Kenyans than real acts of terror".

"It is a fact that America is the target, but America's fear of terrorists in our midst in making Kenya look like the guilty party, when it is in deed the victim by its association with the US," the paper said.

"What do Americans want?" the mass circulation Daily Nation asked rhetorically, saying that the West had piled pressure on Kenya for over a decade on matters diplomatic, economic, legal and political.

"After the elections last year, we thought we would have some peace and quiet to contemplate our poverty and what to do about it.

That, it now appears, is a most unlikely eventuality," it said. - Sapa-AFP.