NAIROBI (Reuters) – A Jamaican Muslim cleric has been flown back to Kenya despite being deported last week because Nigeria refused to give him a transit visa to Gambia, the Kenyan government said yesterday.
Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal was visiting the east African nation for a preaching tour, but Kenyan intelligence officials feared his speeches would have stoked radicalism in a country that has suffered two al Qaeda-linked attacks.
Faisal was deported from Britain in 2007 for preaching racial hatred and urging his audiences to kill Jews, Hindus and Westerners.
He was arrested in Kenya on December 31.
Kenya’s immigration minister, Otieno Kajwang, told a news conference that Faisal was now being held at a prison in Nairobi after he was returned to the capital on Sunday.
“Kenya will keep him in custody until we safely take him back to his country,” Kajwang said.
“Even though Kenya is having some difficulties to deport him … In the interest of the country, Kenya will not release him until he is returned home.”
Attacks in Kenya include a 1998 bomb at the US embassy in Nairobi, as well as a hotel bombing and a botched missile attack on an Israeli airliner leaving Kenya’s Mombasa airport in 2002.
