NAIROBI (Reuters) - U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Michael Ranneberger has met top Somali Islamist leader Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, who is being held by Kenyan intelligence in Nairobi, a U.S. embassy official said on Wednesday.
Ranneberger has said Ahmed potentially can be a player in reconciliation between the interim Somali government and Ahmed's militant Islamist movement, which government troops with Ethiopian backing defeated over the New Year.
The U.S. official, who confirmed the meeting which a source had told Reuters about earlier, spoke on condition of anonymity and declined to give any details.
Ahmed, one of the most visible faces of the defeated Somalia Islamic Courts Council (SICC) during its six-month rule of most of southern Somalia, surrendered at the Kenya-Somalia border.
Ahmed is being held at an upmarket hotel on the outskirts of Nairobi by Kenya's National Security Intelligence Service.
Diplomats say Kenya, and possibly the United States, had a role in brokering Ahmed's surrender.
A senior Kenyan official told Reuters on Wednesday that Ahmed wants to seek refuge in Yemen, and that Kenya will not send him to Somalia because he would be killed there.
Kenya is also trying to push him to talk with Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, who is in Nairobi, but Gedi has thus far refused, the official said.
Washington and its ally Ethiopia have said the SICC had al Qaeda members in its ranks, and the United States has conducted at least one confirmed air strike against what it believes were al Qaeda hiding with the Islamists in southern Somalia.
Many blame hardcore Islamist remnants for a series of attacks against government and Ethiopian troops in the coastal capital Mogadishu. The SICC has vowed a guerrilla war.
Source: Reuters, Jan 24, 2007