CAIRO -- No group has claimed responsibility for Friday's fatal bomb blasts at two U.S. embassies in east Africa but as recently as this week Egypt's banned Jihad group warned it would retaliate against what it said was Washington's help in extraditing Islamists to Cairo from Albania.

There was no evidence in the statement that Jihad had a connection to the bomb blasts at the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which left at least 80 people dead, including several U.S. officials.

Jihad's statement, obtained by Reuters on Friday but distributed to other news organization earlier this week, did not mention any specific action planned.

"We inform the Americans ... of preparations for a response which we hope they read with care, because we will write it, with God's help, in a language they will understand," it said.

The White House said President Clinton was "deeply troubled" by Friday's bombings and was treating the incidents as "a terrorist act."

In an interview in July in Kuwait's al-Rai al-Aam daily, Jihad's leader was quoted as saying there was no alternative to a holy war against American interests in the Middle East.

"America insists on belittling the (Muslim) nation ..." Ayman el-Zawahri, wanted in his native Egypt for allegedly masterminding acts of violence, was quoted as saying.

"Therefore the only alternative before the Muslim nation is to declare (holy war) against America and Israel ... and the Islamic movement is now in agreement on the need for such a Jihad," added Zawahri.

The daily said he was probably residing in Afghanistan along with Saudi Arabian dissident Osama bin Laden, who in May declared a holy war against U.S. forces in his homeland.

This week's Jihad statement was responding to what it called U.S. cooperation in extraditing three Egyptian Islamists to Egypt. It did not give their real names.

A spokesman for a London-based Islamist information center said on Sunday that Albania has extradited to Egypt with U.S. help a Muslim militant sentenced to death in absentia in 1997 and three other men who worked at an Albanian charity.

He said Ahmed Ibrahim el-Naggar was extradited in June.

"Albania, in collusion with NATO forces, arrested them in Tirana on June 28 and after the Americans had interrogated them for a week, Albania handed them over to Egypt," he said.

Naggar was sentenced to death by an Egyptian military court last October for plotting to kill government officials and was convicted of sending money to Egypt to revive Jihad. Egypt's interior ministry had no immediate comment.

The Jihad group appeared in Egypt in the early 1970s and claimed responsibility for killing President Anwar Sadat at a military parade in 1981. Its ideology revolves around the use of violence to remove what it says is the corrupt state and its leaders and replace them with a strict Islamic government.

About 1,200 people, mostly militants and police, have been killed since militant groups, the largest of them Gama's Islamiya, took up arms to topple President Hosni Mubarak's government and set up a purist Islamic state.