Team sent to quell Dubai diplomatic row

Foreign Affairs minister Moses Wetang’ula on Sunday leads a government delegation to the United Arab Emirates to quell a diplomatic storm caused by deportation of some people of Dubai royal family early this month.

Mr Wetang’ula, Labour minister John Munyes and officials from the Immigration department are flying to UAE to end the diplomatic row that has put the jobs of 36,000 Kenyans based in the gulf country on the line.

A senior Foreign Affairs ministry official who declined to be named because he is not the ministry’s spokesman said the team will apologise to the UAE government over the deportation incident. The row, we learnt, stemmed from overzealous action of officers from the anti-terrorism police unit based in Mombasa over the Easter weekend.

The security officers are said to have arrested four people they claimed were terror suspects and locked them up at the Moi International Airport. The four, who had already spent a week in the country, had flown to the coastal city that fateful weekend when they were arrested by the detectives, grilled for hours before being flown back to Nairobi.

A decision was then made to deport them to Dubai on grounds that they posed a “serious threat to the country’s security”. It later emerged that some of deportees hailed from the ruling family in the UAE, which explains the fury with which authorities in Dubai reacted to the move.

“My staff was not involved in any way. It was over Easter and the security fellows thought the visitors had to be thrown out immediately – that they should not spend an extra day in the country so they simply deported them without involving us,” Immigration Minister Otieno Kajwang told the Sunday Nation.

Outraged, authorities in UAE imposed very stringent new guidelines to Kenyans travelling to or through the UAE, including a requirement that one must be a holder of a degree certificate from a “recognised” university to be able to set foot in the oil rich gulf nation.