He committed a crime, abductors tell man's uncle

BY BRIAN OTIENO @Yobramos4                        

Abdulkareem Abubakar was walking home from the mosque after Ishai prayers on August 28 when a group of about eight men grabbed him from behind.

They were clad in jungle green police jackets, had helmets and covered their faces with black clothes that looked like face-masks, eyewitnesses said.

The men, believed to be police officers, dragged Abubakar into their house in Magongo and ordered all the people inside to lie down.

The commotion that occurred when Abubakar was dragged into the house startled everyone in the sitting room, including his uncle Juma Musa.

“I saw Abu was half-naked and was bleeding from the face,” Musa said. He was narrating the ordeal to reporters at the Haki Africa offices on Sunday.

Musa said the men ransacked the house before taking passport photos of Abubakar.

“They took Abu’s phone and some documents before they left.”

Abubakar was then bundled into a double cabin pickup that had a blue number plate. Such plates are for parastatals.

The men had two other saloon cars which had no number plates.

After a few minutes, one of the men came back into the house, seemingly to assure the family members that they were not thugs.

“Mzee, stand up. We have taken your son. He has committed a crime,” the man told Musa.

Musa said they have neither seen Abubakar nor heard from him since then.

Musa has been reporting to the Changamwe police station, where they reported the matter, once every week to check on the progress of the case.

“We have got nothing concrete from the police,” Musa said.

Abubakar worked at a Crown Paints depot in Changamwe as a casual labourer.

His father died last year and his mother is in Kendu Bay, Homa Bay county, their rural home.

Musa said Abubakar’s phone went off three days after he was abducted.

“We are desperate to know the whereabouts of our son. We do not know whether he is alive or not,” Musa said.

They looked for him in all police stations, hospitals and mortuaries at the Coast. Nothing yielded.

Haki Africa rapid response officer Mathias Shipeta said Kenya is a signatory to several international conventions that protect human rights and must do everything possible to protect human rights.

Shipeta said information about the existence of intelligence cooperation between the Kenyan security forces and some foreign security agencies has been brought to his attention.

“If there exists such a partnership, then it should be guided by law,” Shipeta said.

Declassified UK, a British organisation, published articles about the secret cooperation between the US, the UK and Kenyan security apparatus believed to be responsible for several renditions, killings and disappearances of terror suspects in night-time raids on the same day Abubakar was abducted.

The organisation claimed a clandestine Kenyan paramilitary team is being armed and trained by the American Central Intelligence Agency and British MI6 to take down terror suspects since 2004.

According to the organization, Britain’s intelligence arm, MI6, plays a key role in identifying suspects for a ‘kill or capture’ list and finding and fixing their location.

On Sunday, Shipeta said it is against both Kenyan and international law to abduct a suspect and hold them for hours, days, weeks, or months incommunicado.

He warned that should the elite team fail to follow the law in their operations, the country will one day prove ungovernable.