By NYAMBEGA GISESA
[email protected]
Wednesday, September 04, 2013
KENYA: Since the 1998 terror attacks in Nairobi, the war on terrorism has had its ups and downs.
After the launch of Operation Linda Nchi, there have been a series of grenade attacks and other bombing incidents in various parts of the country.
One of the units that has evolved in the fight against suspected terrorists is the Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU), formed immediately after the bomb attacks on East Africa that were the first major acts of terror by the Al-Qaeda organisation.
Overall, ATPU has become one of the country’s most aggressive security agencies.
However, in the recent past ATPU has been in the news for the wrong reasons after forced disappearances and executions of several terror suspects.
Neither Parliament, which plays an oversight role, nor taxpayers who fund the National Police Service have been told exactly what is going on.
How enforcement agencies can stay ahead of Islamist terrorists without using extrajudicial means has been hotly debated since the 1998 terror attacks.
Human rights activists and Muslim clerics have accused the agency of transforming itself into a killing machine consumed with man hunting as a way of fighting terror.
Forced to rethink the war on terrorism, especially after not finding enough evidence to convict suspects, ATPU is seeing its future, not as the long-term jailer of mass murderers, but as an organisation that erases them.
During our months-long investigations that involved interviews with serving and former police officers, security experts, terror suspects and their families, we established another discrete unit that is so active yet never spoken of - officers in the unit are known as High Risk.
ATPU has dispatched teams of killer cops known as High Risk Officers, whose work is to erase terror suspects, according to officials directly involved in the programme.
ATPU is also increasingly employing informers to monitor sermons in mosques, even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing.
According to our investigations, the informers have assisted the terror fighters to come up with a hit list of suspects who soon fall victim to forced disappearances and executions.
Early last year, one of the informers was killed at a barbershop in Nairobi’s Pumwani area. Another one who helped put together a United Nations report told this writer that he feared for his life.
While the expansion of ATPU has been well known, details about its clandestine operations, including the depth of its ties with foreign security agencies and how much it is funded, have not been previously reported.
However, in a country that has repeatedly been targeted by terrorists, security agencies make no apologies for pushing the envelope.
Neither do they regularly release information on their operations and funding.
One of the enduring questions since the 1998 bomb blast is whether being safe requires giving up some liberty and privacy.
Liberty and privacy
People think that the issue of liberty and privacy goes only goes as far as wiretapping, indefinite detention and the extraordinary renditions are concerned.
They do not know for sure how much they have given up.
How much should you give for the fight on terror? A few lives perhaps?
I will tell you a story that starts with a funeral. The burial of a man who lived a quiet and unremarkable life is about to take place. His neighbours did not know him well. He was a courteous man who lived his own life.
His name is Said Mohammed, and he is wrapped in a reed mat and his wife’s khanga.
His wife says he should have been wrapped with bed sheets from their bed. However, the bed sheets are stained with his blood.
Said was murdered.
His execution took place in broad daylight during lunch hour in Mombasa’s Kiembeni area.
Afternoon prayers
Said had left home for the mosque telling his wife he would eat the food she had already served after afternoon prayers.
“About 10 minutes later, I heard loud bangs at the gate,” his brother-in-law, 16-year-old Twalha Hassan, recalls. “I saw him handcuffed in the company of about 50 police officers.”
Twalha says that some of the police officers entered the house and proceeded to the bedroom.
“They then came back carrying a gun and asked me if I knew what it was,” he narrates.
“When I told them I didn’t, they put me in their vehicle and took me and my sister (Said’s wife) to the nearest police station.”
Kiembeni is a place where even an unimportant incident draws crowds. Said’s arrest broke the afternoon calm in the area as curious neighbours milled around his house.
“There were police both in civilian and official uniform outside his house,” Agnes Kanga, a neighbour recalls.
“A police officer in civilian clothes told us to enter the house,” she says. “Outside, other officers cordoned off the crime scene using tape.”
Heard gunshots
She said they were observing what was happening when they heard gunshots from the house.
A few months ago, we travelled to Said’s house and managed to view his body before he was buried.
There was a brown bed with a blue mattress in his house. This is the place where he met his death. He bled profusely before he died.
Bloodstains
Blood had dried underneath his bed. His hat hanging on the wall with the words Siringi Ni Tabia Yangu (I’m not bragging, it’s the way I am) had bloodstains.
Said was shot as his five-year-old child watched. The official police explanation is that there was a shoot-out between them and the suspect in the single room.
However, we never saw any bullets holes in the walls.
None hit the windows. How could there have been a fire exchange?
Said was probably shot while he sat on his bed. His assassinators then turned the place upside down looking for bullet cartridges.
They might have been keen operators but forgot one important piece of evidence: a 9mm bullet shell probably from a Luger pistol; the alleged murder weapon.