Fazul ‘lived at my house in Nairobi’

Al Qaeda mastermind Fazul Abdullah Mohammed lived in Nairobi for nearly four months and left on the day the United States Embassy in Nairobi was bombed, a court heard Thursday.

A witness said Fazul had rented a house in a posh estate, which he occupied with his family before abruptly ending his tenancy on August 7, 1998, the day of the bombing.

Ms Tamara Chepkemboi Kipingor told senior resident magistrate Lilian Motende that she was approached by Fazul accompanied by another man. He told her that they were interested in renting her house at Runda, which was vacant at the time.

Various counts

The witness was testifying in a case in which three family members — Mr Mahfudh Ashur Hemed, his wife Luftiya Abubakar Bashrahil, and their 18-year-old son Ibrahim Mahfudh Ashurare — face various counts of being linked to Fazul.

Ms Chepkemboi said Fazul agreed to occupy the house and signed a tenancy agreement for six months.

The witness said Fazul indicated that he was Moroccan.

On August 7, 1998, before the expiry of the tenancy, Fazul told the landlady that he had been forced to terminate the agreement and asked her to pick the house keys at night, but she declined. “When I asked him why he wanted to move out, he said his father-in-law was ailing and he needed to attend to him,” she said.

Asked if she could recognise Fazul if she saw him, Ms Kipingor answered in the affirmative, saying she had interacted with him more than 10 times because he would take his rent to her office at Anniversary Towers.

Caused deaths

In the case before the court in Mombasa, the three are charged with being an accessory as they harboured the criminal to enable him to escape punishment after he caused the deaths of 219 people in the blast.

The second charge is that they maintained Fazul in order to enable him to escape punishment after the murder of 15 people at Paradise Hotel in Kikambala on November 28, 2002.

They were also charged with harbouring Fazul who was unlawfully in the country between December 2007 and August 2, 2008.