Face to face with dangerous terrorists

08/06/08
    

By David Ochami and Mwangi Muiruri

As Garissa Secondary School students gathered to protest land grabbing at their school on May 31, 2008, six people slipped into the town unnoticed. They were traveling on an early morning bus headed for Dadajabula on the Kenya-Somalia border.

Two of them were women, who sat mute next to an ethnic Somali youngster. Three others sat elsewhere in the bus
The veiled passengers did not eat or speak, or even disembarked from the bus to dust their faces at any stop between Garissa and Dadajabula, according to a passenger who was on board.

"Passengers normally alight to stretch or dust faces when the bus stops along the route but these passengers did not do this. Throughout the journey they spoke in whispers," says the passenger.

The moment of truth, however, came when one of the "women" dropped a phone, but a man’s hand was exposed when "she" bent to pick it.

Ten hours, later the first three people were detained at Dadajabula police post following an alert by a police officer on the bus.

A crowd gathered at the post when news of the arrest spread, the razzmatazz providing an opportunity for one prisoner to escape.

At about nine o’clock that night, about thirty militiamen armed with AK 47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades swept into the police post, disarmed the five policemen on duty and opened fire, injuring a police officer in the stomach.

The contingent in Dadajabula included officers who had arrived from Liboi, about 30 kilometres southwards, after the post sought reinforcement.

The invaders then drove back to Dobley in a stolen police truck, freeing the three suspects from custody and disabling the station’s radio communication equipment.

They also took with them guns and documents, including the Occurrence Book where crimes are registered.

The invasion lasted less than twenty minutes, according to Wajir OCPD Julius Kitili and eyewitnesses, but it conveyed the vulnerability of Kenya’s national borders, and the potent danger that the lawless Somalia portends.

"The attackers did not stay long. They attacked our officers and took away everything including the passports of the people we had arrested," said Kitili.

As the locals took the injured to hospital in Liboi, the militiamen drove to safety in lawless Somalia.

Terror kingpins

Police and the provincial administration were initially reluctant to offer details of the identity of the freed suspects, fanning theories that one of them may have been Fazul Abdullah Mohammed or Saleh Nabhan Saleh, terror kingpins linked to Al Qaeda and masterminds of the 1998 and 2002 terrorist bombings in Nairobi and Kikambala.

Kitili identifies the rescued prisoners as Jermaine Grant, 25, Swaleh Khamis Masud,23 and Hashim Sheikh Ali Athman, 26, who it is alleged held British passports.

The British High Commission did not respond to CCI enquiries regarding the nationalities of the suspects.

Kitili claims police interrogated the suspects before they were rescued.

North Eastern provincial commissioner Josphat Maingi admitted that Dadajabula police were overwhelmed by the attackers but denied the officers were bribed to set the suspects free.

"The invaders were well armed. They overwhelmed our forces. The police camp was surrounded. They (Kenyan police) had to surrender."

But North Eastern Provincial police commander Stephen Chelimo was circumspect about the suspects’ real identities.

This week, as the country marks the tenth anniversary of the August 7 1998 attack on US embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania, it is apparent that Kenyans are not any safer than they were a decade ago.

The serious breaches of the national borders and the ease with which one can acquire national identification cards, as CCI did last month, confirms corruption in high and low place is the bane to effective policing.

From police’s own accounts, Mohammed acquired two Kenyan passports, the latest issued in February 2008.

On December 13, 2007, the Anti-Terrorism Squad arrested 24 persons on terror allegations in Nairobi’s Eastleigh Estate, all bearing fake Kenyan passports and ID cards.

Confirming the arrests, Government spokesman Alfred Mutua told CCI:

"It is challenging but we are determined to keep terrorism under tight control. We know the pain and the suffering that goes with terror attacks and we are doing all possible to spare our country, our people that pain."

Documentary evidence from the United States Justice Department and copied to Kenya’s security organs tell how East African Al Qaeda cell leader Fazul Abdullah Mohammed alias Abdul Karim aka Harun Fazul quietly entered Kenya through the port of Mombasa, acquired a national Identity card and a Kenyan passport in June 2002.

After participating in the Kikambala attack, he attempted to hit the US embassy in Gigiri on an unspecified date in June 2003.

There is also the question of police bungling, as happened in Dadajabula. Whereas Kitili claims police responded fast to reinforce the Dadajabula post, eyewitnesses disclose that Wajir and Garissa police headquarters did not respond to the distress signal sent from the station in time.

Security sources say in the best of circumstances, a chopper would have been availed to transfer the suspects to Nairobi.

In the event, even local vehicle owners declined to hire out their vehicles to the police to ferry the suspects to Liboi after receiving threats on their cell-phones.

Police overpowered

And the four policemen who finally came to their rescue took five hours to undertake a journey that should have taken an hour. It is then that they encountered the raiding militiamen that overpowered them.

According to passengers on the bus, the off duty officer on the bus from Garissa telephoned colleagues at Dadajabula by cellphone after noticing the suspicious behaviour of two ‘women’ on the bus.

Their disguises were exposed at Dadajabula when the three men were detained and further searches revealed they had lots of US dollars on them, and which they allegedly tried to use to buy their freedom.

Officially, police did not acknowledge finding any money on the suspects.

Meanwhile, the other three accomplices walked away without arousing any suspicion.

"It is they who contacted the raiders from Dobley," says Maingi. "They did not want their parcels to be investigated."

The PC denied the allegation that one suspect escaped from custody before the raid, adding that preliminary reports did not establish whether police sloppiness contributed to terrorists’ successful raid.

Satellite phone

Maingi claimed that "the three had some other people with satellite phones accompanying" or waiting for them at Dadajabula who communicated the arrest to Al Shabab (a terrorist organisation) in Dobley (Somalia).

This has been confirmed by intelligence officers in Liboi and Garissa who allege that four suspects including the one who fled from custody, established contact with Al Shabab terrorists after the arrests.

Intelligence reports, confirmed by Islamists in North Eastern Province now indicate that several foreign fighters destined for Somalia entered Kenya from Mombasa and Nairobi on May 27, 2008, including militants identified as Sheikh Mohamed Harun bin Hamza, a Yemeni, Sheikh Mustafa (a Sudanese) and Sheikh Ahmed Ibrahim of Somalia.

The group arrested at Dadajabula is believed to have been enroute to Mogadishu from Peshawar Valley in Pakistan where they had trained in roadside bomb making and detonation by Kashmir militants.

Apparently, the group travelled together by bus to Garissa where they slept for a day before heading for the border. They carried money for fresh supplies and secrets for Sheikh Hassan Abdullah Hirsi, also known as Hassan Turki, who heads Al Shabab and Al Qaeda in Southern Somalia.

"They came to supply money but some of them were bomb experts requested by Turki to replace those killed in US air-strikes early this year," said a security officer in Daadab.

After the rescue mission from Dadajabula, Kenya deployed police and army forces in a major operation to try and force the militiamen to surrender the suspects and the stolen police truck.

The police truck and the guns were allegedly returned on June 4, 2008, after "negotiations" between Kenyan and Somali elders in Dobley.

Before the rescue, Turki is alleged to have demanded the suspects unconditional release and threatened to strike at Kenyan targets.

Upon their rescue, an Al Shabab spokesman in Kismayu claimed responsibility for the "Dadajabula operation."

Several accounts indicate the militants have joined a resurgent Al Shabab insurgency at Jilib and Ras Kamboni on Somalia’s southern coast next to the border with Kenya, now confirmed to be an Al Qaeda stronghold.

The standard,Nairobi