•Kenya says Salim has an active warrant and has to face the law locally
•The Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC) announced on January 28, the capture of Salim.
Kenyan detectives plan to visit the Democratic Republic of Congo to interrogate a fugitive terror suspect who was arrested there last week.
The detectives from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations said they were first liaising with the Congolese authorities through Interpol, on the arrest of Salim Rashid Mohamed alias Chotara or Turki Salim.
Kenya has formally asked Interpol to help them locate the whereabouts of Salim and prepare for his interrogation and possible extradition to Kenya, officials aware of the developments said.
“We are pursuing this through our mutual legal system. We hope his day will come soon,” said an official aware of the issue.
He had a Sh10 million bounty on his head.
He was arrested on January 28 on suspicion of being a member of the renowned Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamist rebel group in Uganda and DRC.
He had also joined the Islamic State's Central Africa Province (ISCAP).
Anti Terror sleuths are seeking to grill the suspect in relation to the crimes he committed in the country before he fled.
They want to know where he has been since he fled and with who. The officials also want to establish the number of Kenyans in the region so far who were with Salim.
Salim fled the country in December 2020 and sneaked into Congo (DRC) through Uganda.
The terror suspect has been on our watch list after he was charged with terror offences in a Mombasa court and jumped bail, prompting the court to issue a warrant for his arrest.
In 2016, Salim left Kenya for Turkey allegedly to join a Turkish university for undergraduate studies.
However, in the same year, Turkish authorities deported him back to the country after he was arrested trying to cross over to Syria.
The suspect was released pending production of evidence from Turkish authorities.
A year later, the suspect escaped police dragnet in an intelligence-led operation by ATPU detectives, after explosives were recovered in a house he was occupying in Kwale County.
The suspect, who was determined to fulfil his jihadist ideals, was intercepted by detectives at the Moi International Airport in Mombasa on May 12, 2019, as he attempted to flee the country to Sudan.
He was placed behind bars and charged with various terror offences, related to the explosives materials discovered during the raid in Kwale in 2017.
The court granted him bail and he continued attending court sessions until his disappearance in 2020.
During interrogation, the terror suspect told detectives that he had been looking forward to fulfilling Jihad before going to paradise.
Together with two other wanted suspects from Malindi town identified as Murad Suleiman and Mohammud Salim, the fugitive sneaked to Congo (DRC) on December 3, 2020, and informed his family through a short text message that he had gone to a faraway land to fight Jihad and would never come back home.
The suspect allegedly joined ADF, an insurgency that began in 1996 and which is responsible for hundreds of deaths of innocent civilians in Congo (DRC) and western Uganda.
The terror group is believed to be affiliated with the Islamic State after the latter claimed responsibility for an ADF attack in 2019 under the ‘Central Africa Province’, an administrative division of the Islamic State.
Salim is the author of propaganda videos depicting machete killings and arrests of civilians in the regions of eastern Congo.
He has previously been captured in a video clip beheading a man believed to be a local.
The Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC) announced on January 28 the capture of Salim, as one of the driving brains of the terrorist movement Alliance of the ADF.
Salim went to Qubaa Nursery in Mvita and later joined Qubaa Primary School, before being transferred to Abu Hureira Academy, where he sat the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) exam in 2010 and passed.
He joined a private secondary school in Mombasa in 2011 and sat his KCSE exam four years later, emerging as one of the top candidates.
Salim was selected to join the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology but was not interested.
He was later enrolled at the Technical University of Mombasa to study computer engineering but dropped out after the first year.
He later enrolled for a certificate course in computer studies at Abraar Muslim School after which he joined computer engineering studies at Istanbul Kultur University in Turkey.