The violent American attacks on Mr. Ben Laden derive from his “declaration of war on America”, and from a series of terrorist attacks on American interests, the latest being on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salam which resulted in more than 250 deaths and more than one thousand injured. Ben Laden was named as responsible by the person who assembled the Nairobi bomb.
One of the Israeli principles after an attack they call terrorist is to strike hard and quick  against a target regarded as suspicious. The aim is to inspire fear and to act as a deterrent. On this occasion the Americans seem to have adopted the same principle.
It is a matter of fact that ben Laden lived in Sudan between 1991 and 1996 and set up a number of terrorist camps, notably at Damazine and Soba. He is a multi-millionaire who has been deprived of his Saudi nationality. Under American pressure he was compelled  to leave Sudan and take refuge in Afghanistan, but he retained his Sudanese commercial interests. His financial adviser recently defected to the United States and gave the Americans a list of his Sudanese interests, including a chemical factory.
The bombed factory, called Al Shifa, is on the eastern edge of Khartoum North industrial area It was started four or five years ago and for some time was surrounded by guards. It is possible that at this period suspicious chemicals where stored there.. The factory was officially inaugurated two years ago and sold in May-June 1998 to Salah Idris, a Saudi -Sudanese acting for a leading bank in Saudi Arabia. The machinery in the factory was not new and it was probably used to process imported pharmaceutical products into pills, vials, syrups, tablets and the like. It does not seem possible that the factory as ever been capable of producing a chemical compound suitable for the manufacture of poison gas.
There have been rumours in Khartoum for several years that chemical weapons were being produced locally, but the al Shifa site was not mentioned. The talk was rather of a complex in the middle of a residential area on the banks of the Blue Nile. There was also talk of the industrial area in South Khartoum, of  a factory at Shagara, also in South Khartoum, and of another one in Soba, built by the Chinese. Some years ago the Sudanese were accused of using chemical weapons against Nubian rebels in South Kordofan, and against the SPLA in the Wau region (West-South Sudan).
In short, there is no smoke without fire, even if the exact location of the fire is not always easy to locate. One cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs, but no casualties have been reported from the bombed factory. In any case, Sudan has been warned, at no great cost, that the United States are determined and that it can’t anymore expect to be protected by its remoteness.