{UAH} Think disappearances and extra-judicial killings are exclusive to Uganda? Kenya is in the game
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Kenyan rights group accuses anti-terror police of unlawful killings
EmailA Kenyan human rights group has called on Britain and the US to suspend their support for anti-terror police accused of a string of disappearances and extra-judicial killings in the country.
Illegal tactics allegedly used by Kenya's anti-terrorism police unit (ATPU), which receives finance and training from the UK and US, may be strengthening support for radical Islamists in east Africa, a report byMuslims for Human Rights (Muhuri) concludes.
The report, titled We Are Tired of Taking You To Court, documents six years of alleged abuses in Kenya's port city of Mombasa, which has become a recruiting ground for the al-Qaida-linked Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab.
Based on interviews with former detainees and families of victims, the dossier builds a picture of routine harassment by the police unit, as well as unlawful killings and mistreatment of suspects in custody.
"These abuses are not only unlawful but counterproductive," said Jonathan Horowitz, of the Open Society Justice Initiative, a group funded by the financier George Soros, which co-authored the report. "Violent extremists use such abuses to justify violence and to recruit others."
Kenyan authorities have denied licensing the unit to operate outside the law and claim it has thwarted a number of terror plots. Since 2003 Kenya has received nearly $50m from the US state department's anti-terrorism assistance fund. It has also received unspecified training, equipment and funds from the UK.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said in a statement: "All our support to the ATPU is delivered in line with [government guidelines] … to mitigate human rights abuses." It said it would challenge the unit where allegations were made.
Muhuri names 20 individuals who had been under investigation by Kenya's anti-terror police who have subsequently disappeared or been murdered.
It says there is evidence to implicate the ATPU in the disappearance of Badru Mramba in November 2012. It also presents "credible allegations" that the same unit used unlawful lethal force on Omar Faraj, a Mombasa resident killed during an operation last year.
Similar allegations are made about extrajudicial executions by the ATPU of two more known suspects, Kassim Omollo and Salim Mohammed Nero.
The unit was set up 10 years ago in response to the 1998 embassy bombings in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and related attacks on targets in Mombasa.
Its operations have come against a backdrop of deepening radicalisation among Muslim populations in coastal Kenya, increased foreign intervention in neighbouring Somalia and terror attacks inside Kenya. The worst of these came this September when gunmen stormed the Westgate mall in Nairobi, an attack claimed by al-Shabaab.
The ATPU has regularly arrested suspects but has delivered very few convictions in court. The unit has been accused of the killing in August 2012 of Sheikh Aboud Rogo Mohammed, a radical imam under investigation by the UN and the US for links to al-Shabaab.
In the wake of the Westgate attack, his unofficial successor as leader of the coast's radical community, Sheikh Ibrahim Omar Rogo, was killed in a near identical shooting in the same area of Mombasa. Kenyan police haves denied involvement in either death.
Abubakar Sheikh Ibrahim Shariff, another radical preacher and friend of the deceased pair, has openly accused the ATPU of the killings. "The government is murdering us," he said, claiming that no serious effort had been made to investigate the October shooting in which three other men also died.
Known popularly as Makaburi – Swahili for "graveyard" – the sheikh denies membership of al-Shabaab but supports their methods. He said counter-terrorism operations were making more Kenyan Muslims agree with him. "The jihad is a tree, the more blood you spill the more it will grow," he said.
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