By Yassin Juma

NAIROBI 

Kenyan police on Saturday arrested two suspected Al-Shabaab militants who had sneaked into the country with large amounts of explosives with plans to carry out a terror attack, a police official has said.

"This is the largest amount of explosives we have impounded in recent years  as far as I know," Mohammed Kanyare, a security official with Kenya's Anti-Terror Unit, told The Anadolu Agency.

"They had managed to enter into the country, but through our intelligence we caught up with them as they tried to enter Nairobi" Kanyare added.

Police believes that the duo were on a mission to attack an upmarket shopping mall in western Nairobi.

The amount of explosives we seized is powerful enough to bring down a five-story building, a police officer said.  

Intelligence reports indicate that Al-Shabaab militants had been sent on the mission by Adan Garaar, the group's head of external operations who was killed in a U.S. drone strike on Thursday.

In 2013, the Somali militant group staged an attack on a Nairobi shopping mall, killing 67 people.

In 2011, Kenya had sent troops to war-torn Somalia to pursue Al-Shabaab, but the group vowed to stage attacks on Kenyan soil until the East African country withdrew its troops from Somalia.