Ethiopia returns to Kenya terror suspects

Eight Kenyan suspected Islamist fighters who were held in Ethiopia return home.

Eight Kenyan suspected Islamist fighters who were held in Ethiopia after being sent there in secret in early 2007 were returned home on Saturday, the Government has said.

After the Islamists who controlled large parts of neighbouring Somalia were driven out by Somali and Ethiopian forces, activists and Muslim groups say Kenya covertly rounded up scores of people and sent them to Somalia and then Ethiopia.

The US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report this week that at least 150 men, women and children from more than 18 countries including the United States, Britain and Canada had been rounded up near the Somali border.

It said most had been sent home after interrogation, but that 10 remained in Ethiopia and several others were missing.

Kenyan government spokesman Alfred Mutua said in a statement on Saturday: "Eight Kenyans who had been fighting with Somali separatists and who had been held in Ethiopia were early this morning returned home to Kenya ...

"Investigations have revealed that these Kenyans had travelled to Somalia in 2006 to get militia training and were recruited into terrorist cells by international terrorists operating in Southern Somalia," the statement said.

"Indeed, most of them met and worked with such notorious international terrorists as Haroun Fazul and Saleh Nabhan, the leaders of the al Qaeda cell in East Africa."

He said the suspects had been flown to the town of Voi, and then escorted to their respective homes.

Mutua said all eight had been sent back to Somalia because they had pretended to be Somali nationals when they tried to cross into Kenya last year.

"They denied they were Kenyan and, together with another 70-plus foreigners, were returned to Somalia," he said.

The Saturday Nation newspaper said it had obtained a Kenyan government report that said the men included a former driver for Haroun Fazul, also known as Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a suspect in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Muslim and rights groups say those who were rounded up in 2007 were taken for questioning to Ethiopia, whose forces help to support Somalia's fragile government.

The groups say they were kept in jails rife with torture that some campaigners called an "African Guantanamo", drawing a parallel with suspects held at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba under the U.S.-led "war on terror".