By a Staff Reporter

Djibouti, which is in the middle of a border dispute with Eritrea, handed over five days ago, an Eritrean suspected of Ethiopian railroad bombings near Dire Dawa and allegedly with links to Al Qaeda’s East Africa Branch, a senior Djibouti Security official told the media. Eritrean special border officers collected the suspect. The suspect, an Eritrean of Afar decent, was detained on January 3rd this year and is being held in the Djiboutian capital.

According to the Djiboutian officials, the Eritrean was under investigation regarding phone calls he reportedly made on his UAE GSM cell phone to some of the bombers responsible for the attack on Ethiopia which killed a number of people both in Dire Dawa and Addis Ababa.

The officials said the Eritrean had also been calling other Islamist militants trained in Eritrea. "Ethiopian antiterrorism and federal police said intelligence agents followed the Eritreans to Djibouti after they entered the country from Somalia in January and arrested them at a Mosque in Balbala, Djibouti on charges of violating immigration and border laws,” according to some Somali news sources. The Eritreans were in Mogadishu, Somalia, before they were detained in Djibouti whose officials also say the Eritreans made frequent trips into Ethiopia and Sudan.

Meanwhile, the Foreign Minister of Djibouti, whose territory has been encroached upon by Eritrea, has called upon the United Nations Security Council to intervene, and warned that his country was inching closer to a war with its neighbour.

"We call on the Council to deploy urgently all necessary measures toward preventing yet another conflict," Djiboutian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Ali Youssouf wrote to the United Nations on Tuesday, "We consider Eritrea's move a misguided intimidation and ...an undisguised and naked provocation against my country's sovereignty and territorial integrity," he added.

Ali Youssouf added that attempts to quietly defuse the tension had failed and that Eritrea seems intent on illegally occupying the Ras Doumeira mountain range, which overlooks the busy Red Sea shipping lanes.

Asmara denied the accusation after which the Arab League's Peace and Security Council held an emergency session at Djibouti's request, asking for League Secretary General Amr Moussa to send a fact-finding mission to the area and report back to the League.

The under-secretary of the Arab league for political affairs, Ambassador Ahamed Ben Hely, said Sunday that “the Arab Peace and Security Council approved Djibouti’s request to send the mission in an effort to solve the crisis between the two countries.”

According to him, the Council discussed the border problem between Djibouti and Eritrea in its first ever meeting Sunday at delegates level.

Ben Hely revealed that he will meet the ambassadors of the two countries to explore ways to defuse tensions and prevent more escalations.

“The Council called Djibouti and Eritrea to exercise restraint in dealing with the border issue and to seek to solve it through peaceful means,” he pointed out.

In a related news, Ethiopia last week called on the UN Security Council to do more than just condemn Eritrea for continued obstructions that forced its peace monitoring mission to temporarily relocate.

"Appeasing Eritrea has never worked. Ethiopia and the peoples of our region expect more from the Security Council if it is to be taken seriously as a bulwark for international peace and security," the Ethiopian foreign ministry said in a statement.

The council unanimously slammed Eritrea for cutting off diesel supplies to the UN mission monitoring the Eritrea-Ethiopia border dispute (UNMEE), forcing it to pull out of the country.

Last month, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that a new war could break out if a U.N. peacekeeping mission along the heavily-militarized Eritrea-Ethiopia border were disbanded. But Mr. Ban’s warning came after Eritrea had expelled the 1500 member U.N. mission from a buffer zone that had separated the two country’s armies, effectively rendering the blue-helmeted force useless.

The Security Council issued statements condemning Eritrea’s expulsion order, but failed to take any further action. Ethiopia last week chided the world body for what it called “appeasing” Eritrea, and urged the Security Council to act forcefully against the Asmara government.

Reaction from Eritrea has been muted. In a statement issued in February, Eritrea’s foreign ministry said it was expelling the U.N. peacekeepers because their presence was not in keeping with the 2000 Algiers peace agreement aimed at resolving the border dispute.