Fazul Abdallah kept us on tenterhooks

There are eight photographs and 18 different names on the FBI poster declaring Fazul Abdullah Mohammed a most wanted man. The man is also said to have used three different birth dates at various times in his life.

But one figure looms at the top of the page with unerring clarity: Anybody who can help capture this man will be US$5 million (Sh370 million) richer.

Fazul is believed to be the head of the Al-Qaeda terror cell in East Africa and, since he left the deserts of Afghanistan and arrived in East Africa in the early 1990s, he has authored untold grief and anguish.

He is named as the central figure in the plot to bomb the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998, the first time the world understood the scale of Al-Qaeda’s ambition. That attack claimed 213 lives and injured hundreds of others.

A report by Kenyan and American security agencies indicated Fazul helped assemble the bomb at a house in the upmarket Runda neighbourhood of Nairobi and drove the lead car that guided a pick-up truck ferrying the suicide bombers.

But he was not done yet. Fazul returned to the country in 2000 through Siyu, a remote island in the Kenyan coast, where he introduced himself as Abdul Karim.

A visit by reporters to the island a few years after Fazul disappeared offered revealing insights into Al-Qaeda’s operations, and also helped provide a mirror into the relationship between terror and poverty.
Siyu is a tiny fort village lost somewhere between Somalia and the Kenyan island of Lamu. It was designed to be as remote as possible.

Due to the regular imperialist adventures of the Sultan of Zanzibar, the residents of Siyu constructed a narrow channel through which to get to the island, and to make sure that bigger ships would not spot the area while sailing by.

Those 18th century considerations became irrelevant after the Sultan’s empire crumbled. But the island continued to be woefully neglected by the central government after independence. Infrastructure is non-existent here, and formal education comprises a few Madrassas (Islamic schools). There is no electricity. No television signal from a Kenyan broadcaster even.

It was here that Fazul chose to plan the Paradise Hotel bombing of 2002. He married a local girl, built a new Madrassa, preached at the local mosque and established two football teams, Al-Qaeda and Kandahar, the latter named after a city in Afghanistan.

Hosting terrorist

The residents had no clue to the fact that they were hosting a man who would later organise a terrorist attack against the Israeli-owned Paradise Resort in Kikambala a few years later, which killed 11 people.

Fazul also attempted to bring down an Israeli airliner carrying 261 passengers, an act which would have made it the worst single mass murder of Jews since the Second World War.

He remains at large. An elusive, shrewd and dangerous menace to security in the region.