BusinessWeek
By David Malingha Doya
Friday, October 25, 2013
Kenya’s Interior Ministry said it will prosecute 15 senior and mid-tier immigration officials for issuing fraudulent identity documents in a crackdown on illegal immigration as it urged more Somali refugees to go home.
“The purge has started today and will extend to many other government departments,” the Nairobi-based ministry said in a statement on its Twitter account. “This exercise will enable us to flush out all those who have been issued with illegal passports and other identification documents.”
Kenya, which hosts one of the world’s largest refugee camps of more than half a million mostly Somalis, is working with the United Nations and the Horn of African government to accelerate repatriation, the ministry said.
“We have welcomed with open arms, refugees fleeing from insecurity in neighboring countries, but we wont allow them to harm us,” the ministry said, citing Interior Secretary Joseph Ole Lenku. “Some refugees have abused our hospitality to plan and launch terror attacks from the safety of refugee camps. This can’t be allowed.”
The action comes amid a probe of the Sept. 21 attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, claimed by the Somalia-based Islamist group, al-Shabaab, which left 67 civilians and security officers dead in a four-day stand-off.
Al-Shabaab said it attacked the mall in revenge for Kenya’s deployment of more than 4,000 troops in Somalia in 2011 after blaming the militants for a series of kidnappings and the murder of a British tourist in the country. The militant group denied the accusations.
The conflict in Somalia since the 1991 fall of Mohamed Siad Barre’s dictatorship has spawned more than a million refugees, about a 10th of its population and more than any other nation except for Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.
To contact the reporter on this story: David Malingha Doya in Nairobi at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Antony Sguazzin at [email protected]