20110921
Reuters
NAIROBI (Reuters) - A plumber found an unexploded hand grenade in the Nairobi building housing the office of Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, but police said it was a harmless training grenade.

Odinga was in his office meeting Chief Justice Willy Mutunga when police asked everyone to evacuate the building so that they could search it after the grenade was discovered.

Nairobi was rocked by grenade explosions on two separate days last December, blasts which police said were the work of Somalia's al Qaeda-linked Islamist al Shabaab rebels.

On Tuesday, bomb disposal officers and police with sniffer dogs searched the building after the grenade was found in a store near the prime minister's office.

No other explosive devices were found, and police said it was too early to say who could have planted the grenade.

"After analysis, we confirmed that the grenade is harmless, it is used for training and is not the kind of grenade that is used for killing or maiming people," Charles Owino, the deputy police spokesman, told Reuters late on Tuesday.

He said the grenade was of a type normally used to create a brilliant flash of light to blind an enemy.

Odinga's office is located across a busy street from that of President Mwai Kibaki, close to the parliament building and a cluster of government offices.

Two people were killed last December when a bag containing a hand grenade exploded just before it was carried onto a bus bound for the Ugandan capital Kampala. Earlier that month, three Kenyan policemen were killed in a grenade and gun attack blamed by police on al Shabaab.

Six people were killed in a grenade attack on a political rally at a park in Nairobi in June last year. Analysts blamed the attack on opponents of a new constitution.