Monday, January 30, 2012
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A Muslim preacher who was arrested on Sunday after he was allegedly found with a cache of weapons at his house in Kilifi has been arraigned in court but denied the charges.Aboud Rogo Mohammed, who was named in a United Nations report last year as having links with Somalia’s Al-Shabab militia, denied the charges before magistrate Rosemary Mutende.
He was charged with intention to commit a felony and being in possession of explosives without a valid certificate.
His application to be released on bond was due to be determined later on Monday.
Rogo, a cleric in Kenya’s port city of Mombasa since 1997, was arrested in a raid in the early hours of Sunday morning following a tip off, police said.
Police said they had seized firearms, ammunition and detonators in the raid at his house in Kikambala, Kilifi County.
The preacher was first arrested in 2003, alongside three other Kenyans, accused of involvement in the November 2002 suicide bombing of the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel, but was acquitted two years later.
Twelve Kenyans, three Israelis and three suicide bombers died in the blast.
The suspected Al-Shabaab member was also linked to the December 2010 bombing of a Kampala bound-bus in Nairobi, in which he was charged and the case is still pending.
The Imam is alleged to have introduced Fazul Abdullah Mohammed – the late head of Al-Qaeda’s east Africa cell shot dead last year in Somalia’s war-torn capital Mogadishu – to at least one of the men who helped him carry out the twin US embassy bombings in east Africa in 1998.