Saudi Arabia is leading an Arab coalition with aerial bombardments to stop the advance of Shi'ite Houthi rebels on the port city of Aden and assure the internationally recognized government led by President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi returns to power.

he move has prompted a growing list of nations to evacuate their citizens and is expected to spark an exodus of refugees - with many of them likely to land in the Horn of Africa nations of Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia’s autonomous regions.

Security analyst Andrew Franklin said the power vacuum in Yemen also posed a huge risk that terrorist groups would expand operations.

"The fact that this is the same way so many illegal immigrants flow across into Yemen from Somalia, Somaliland, and Eritrea. There is a tremendous amount of trade between Yemen anyway, a lot of ports, smaller fishing ports, smaller trans-shipping points that were always fully policed. They were in fact policed by the central government in Sana'a; that government is gone. In this environment, much like in Libya, the strong or focus groups such as al-Qaida are able to expand their influence," he said.

An increasing number of conventional weapons and trained jihadist fighters will now be able to transit through Yemen and cross into Somaliland, into northern Somalia and make their way along the coast down into Lamu County. The whole purpose of al-Shabab in Kenya to date has been to essentially motivate insurgency in highly marginalized areas but basically to eliminate the government of Kenya from its border areas with Somalia

Documents presented in court stated that the rest of the nine suspects, among them a Yemeni and a Ugandan, were suspected of being on a surveillance mission for “soft targets”.

The Yemeni, Mr Ahmed Mohamed Ali, was arrested at the University of Nairobi's Kabete campus hostels but he denied being a terrorist and told magistrate Benson Nzakyo that he had come to Kenya to study English.

NOTHING TO DO WITH IT

“I am sorry about what is happening to Kenya, but I must state that I have nothing to do with it,” he said.

The suspect is among those to spend the next 15 days in custody for profiling.