The lawyer of an opposition politician with dual Kenyan and Canadian citizenship yesterday said his client was detained by police at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport during an attempt to force him onto a plane to Canada.
Miguna Miguna, a lawyer, was deported last month by Kenyan authorities for his role in a protest by opposition leader Raila Odinga, who maintains he was the winner of an election that returned Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta to power last year.
Shortly before his deportation, which came after Odinga enraged the government by staging a symbolic “swearing-in ceremony,” Miguna was charged with treason.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Earlier this month a Kenyan court then ordered that Miguna’s Kenyan passport be restored and that he be granted entry to the country.
He landed at Nairobi’s international airport on Monday afternoon, his lawyer Nelson Havi said.
Immigration officials yesterday asked Miguna to surrender his Canadian passport and refused to accept his Kenyan identity card as a valid travel document, Havi said.
An hours-long standoff ensued before several dozen plainclothes officers dragged Miguna onto an Emirates airline plane bound for Dubai, said Kenyan Senator James Orengo, an opposition lawmaker.
Live footage broadcast by private Kenyan TV station Citizen showed Miguna in the doorway of what appeared to be an Emirates plane shouting at a crew member: “I’m not going anywhere, you cannot take me from my country by force.”
“There was an attempt to force him onto the plane and he resisted justifiably,” said Orengo, who said he witnessed Miguna being “terribly manhandled, pushed and dragged” by plainclothes officers at the airport.
Orengo said the officers then took the politician off the plane and briefly held him at airport immigration offices before taking him to a police station in the airport in the early hours yesterday.
Odinga came to the airport on Monday night to try to intervene on Miguna’s behalf and said his Kenyan passport should be returned as a condition for political dialogue, according to Orengo.
A statement from the Kenyan Ministry of the Interior early yesterday said Miguna became “unruly and threw a tantrum” at the airport and that he had demanded to be allowed to enter Kenya without being cleared through immigration.
“We have not denied him [entry], we just need him to follow the process like everybody else,” ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said by telephone.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS