Kenya charged three people on Monday with helping a top al Qaeda operative escape over the weekend, nearly 10 years after two US embassy blasts he is accused of planning put the militant group on the world stage.
Fazul Abdullah Mohammed has evaded capture ever since his indictment by the United States for the twin attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 240 people on August 7, 1998.
Police arrested three Kenyans after a raid late on Saturday on a private villa in the resort town of Malindi, and charged them in a Mombasa court on Monday. They seized mobile phones, documents and a camera. "The three have been charged with helping and harbouring Fazul Abdullah comfortably and aiding him to escape punishment, knowing that he was behind the killing of 15 people in Kikambala," said a document read by a prosecutor in court. Mohammed, the Comorian-born leader of al Qaeda's east African cell, had sneaked into Kenya from nearby Somalia for treatment of a kidney ailment, Kenyan police have said.
The suspects - Mahfoudh Ashur Hemed and his son, Ibrahim Mahfoudh, and Mahfoudh's wife, Lutfiya Abubakar - all pleaded not guilty during their appearance in court. Chief Magistrate Catherine Mwangi ordered them held for four days without bail, to give police more time for investigations. Mohammed is the most wanted al Qaeda operative in Africa with a $5 million bounty on his head for the 1998 bombings, the first major attack reliably attributed by the United States to the militant group led by Osama bin Laden.
Kenyan authorities also want Mohammed for a 2002 blast at an Israeli-owned hotel in Kikambala that killed 15 people and a simultaneous but failed rocket attack on an Israeli passenger jet, both in the resort areas around the port city of Mombasa.
Security officials believe Mohammed has operated in Somalia since before the 1998 blasts, moving freely in the absence of any effective central government and slipping into Kenya easily. Kenya's government has been under US pressure for years to improve its counterterrorism work. This often puts it at odds with its Muslim population, about 10 percent of Kenya's 36 million people.
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