Saturday, November 02, 2013
In August 2012, a leader of a Kenyan mosque that has
attracted extremist followers was shot dead as he drove through the
streets of Mombasa. Fourteen months later, another leader of the same
mosque met the same fate. There have been no arrests in either case.
Abubakar
Shariff Ahmed, an Islamic community leader associated with the same
mosque, is certain that he will also be killed. And he believes - as do
many others - that the police haven't solved the two high-profile
killings because they are the ones who carried them out. Riots broke out
in Mombasa after Aboud Rogo was killed in August 2012 and after Sheik
Ibrahim Ismael was killed in October, and tensions remain high in this
shabby seaside city ringed by high-end resorts that sit on whitesand
beaches.
While the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi in September
was the highest-profile terrorist action by Islamic extremists in East
Africa since the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es
Salaam in 1998, a low-level conflict has been simmering for years in the
region, particularly in Kenya which has been a recruiting ground for
the Somali group al-Shabab and where police are accused of kidnapping
and killing suspected extremists.
The latest U.S. State Department
report on human rights practices in Kenya says security forces are
suspected of being responsible for a number of forced disappearances.
"At
least a half dozen prominent Muslim leaders alleged to have terrorist
ties were victims of killings or forced disappearances," the report
says.
Ahmed, who dyes his beard orange and speaks fluent Arabic
after living for almost 20 years in the United Arab Emirates, makes
statements he knows to be controversial, such as saying the al-Shabab
gunmen who attacked the Westgate Mall, killing 67 people, were justified
because of Kenya's invasion of Somalia.
A July report from the UN
Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea accuses Ahmed of ties to a
Kenyan terror group known as al-Hijra.
Ahmed denies it and
counters that Muslims have no legal recourse to fight back against the
oppression he says exists in Kenya. He believes he will be killed
because of his outspokenness. "I'm living on borrowed time. The same guy
who ordered Aboud Rogo's death is going to order mine," Ahmed told The
Associated Press in his cramped office in an apartment block where he
sits under a black flag with Arabic writing on it that says "There is no
God but Allah."
Ahmed has no official connection with the Masjid
Musa Mosque, which is governed by committee, but he attends the mosque
and is someone whom worshippers will listen to. The U.S. State
Department report says Rogo and Ahmed survived an abduction attempt in
July 2012.
Ahmed says he is "duty-bound" to avenge the death of
his friend, Rogo. He says he has offered a bounty of about $11,500 to
any police officer who will tell him which fellow police officer killed
Rogo.
Meanwhile, police have largely kept quiet about any
investigation they may be conducting into the Oct. 4 shooting deaths of
Ismael and three others who were in the car with him. The coastal police
chief did not respond to repeated calls for comment. A national police
spokesman told AP to call back later but then turned off his phone.
Family members of the victims doubt there has been any investigation at all.
The
bullet-riddled car - an AP reporter counted 25 bullet holes in the
car's right side, six in the front, and one in the back - sits at the
wood shop of the 35-year-old who had been driving it. Mohamed Hamoud,
the father of the slain driver, says no authorities have ever examined
the car - not even at the scene - or interviewed any family members.
"Nothing. Nobody has approached us. It is the government that did the work," Hamoud said.
A barrage of bullets also killed Mohammed in August 2012 as he drove in Mombasa with his family.
In
the interview, Ahmed acknowledged that there are some in the coastal
Muslim community and the Masjid Musa Mosque who embrace the jihad
ideology and support the al-Qaida-linked militant group al-Shabab in
Somalia. But he says the killers of the mosque leaders and those behind
the unexplained disappearances of several other Muslims on the coast are
not lessening that element, they are fuelling it.