Kenya has deported Jamaican Muslim cleric Abdullah al-Faisal, who is on an international terror watchlist and served four years in a British jail for inciting racial hatred, police said yesterday.
“Al-Faisal is no longer in the country, he has been deported through a neighboring country,” police spokesman Erick Kiraithe told AFP.
“There was a problem deporting him initially, but we finally managed to get him out of the country ... He is headed to Jamaica,” he said.
PHOTO: AFP
Another police source said the cleric left Kenya on Monday night by road to neighboring Tanzania.
Officials had said on Tuesday the cleric was stuck in Kenya despite attempts to deport him because other nations were refusing to allow him to transit through their countries.
Britain has said that el-Faisal’s teachings heavily influenced one of the bombers who carried out the 2005 transport network bombings in London that killed 52 people.
El-Faisal — who has called for Americans, Hindus and Jews to be killed — traveled from Nigeria and through Angola, Malawi, Swaziland, Mozambique and Tanzania by road before coming to Kenya, said a Kenyan official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the issue.
South Africa and the UK have declined to grant him transit visas, the official said. The visas would allow el-Faisal to connect to flights to Jamaica, which has said it would accept him but would keep a close eye on him. Tanzania also declined to grant him a visa, despite the fact he entered Kenya from Tanzania.
El-Faisal served four years in Britain for inciting murder and stirring racial hatred by urging followers to kill Americans, Hindus and Jews.
Internet postings purportedly written by a Nigerian man now charged with trying to bomb a US airliner on Christmas Day referred to el-Faisal as a cleric to whom he had listened.
El-Faisal preached at London’s Brixton mosque in the 1990s before being ejected by mosque authorities because of his support for violent jihad.
The mosque was attended at different times by Richard Reid, who is serving a life sentence in a US prison after a failed 2001 attempt to blow up an airplane, and convicted Sept. 11, 2001, plotter Zacarias Moussaoui.
He later toured widely in Britain preaching and selling audio tapes of his sermons. The British government has said he was a key influence on July 7 bomber Jermaine Lindsay.
El-Faisal was arrested in Kenya on New Year’s Eve by anti-terror police as he was leaving a mosque in the coastal town of Mombasa.
Al-Amin Kimathi, an official of the Muslim human rights forum, said that police told el-Faisal at the time of his arrest that he had violated his visa terms by preaching in mosques.
Immigration Minister Otieno Kajwang said that when el-Faisal arrived in the country on Dec. 24, he was not stopped at immigration offices based in Lunga-Lunga, a Kenya border point with Tanzania. Immigration officials were not able to do a background check because their computers were not connected to a database.
He said the database was shut down to install new software.
“He must have known that our machines were down,” Kajwang said.
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