Officials: Radical Jamaican-born Muslim cleric returns to Kenya after his deportation fails

Radical Muslim cleric flown back to Kenya

NAIROBI, Kenya — A radical Jamaican-born Muslim cleric who led a British mosque attended by convicted terrorists was flown back to Kenya on Sunday after an attempt to deport him failed, officials said.

Nigerian authorities refused to grant a transit visa for Sheik Abdullah el-Faisal and instead sent him back to Kenya early Sunday, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

Al-Amin Kimathi, head coordinator for the Muslim Human Rights Forum, said el-Faisal was now being held in a Nairobi prison. He said el-Faisal had been invited to Kenya by Muslim youths to give lectures.

Kenya deported el-Faisal on Thursday, as the Immigration Minister Otieno Kajwang said the cleric posed a serious threat to the country’s security.

Kajwang said the cleric had chosen Gambia as a destination, and Gambia accepted, after attempts to fly him to Jamaica failed. Britain, South Africa, Tanzania and the U.S. have declined to grant el-Faisal a transit visa that would allow him to connect to flights to Jamaica, which has said it would accept him but would keep a close eye on him.

El-Faisal served four years in Britain for inciting murder and stirring racial hatred by urging followers to kill Americans, Hindus and Jews. Britain deported him to Jamaica in 2007.

At a news conference Sunday, Kimathi made a call and put on speaker phone a man who identified himself to journalists as el-Faisal.

He said he was being held at a prison in Nairobi’s industrial area and described the conditions as “horrible.”

It was not possible to independently verify the claim.

The man said he had traveled to 10 African countries and did not have problems with any of the authorities in those countries until he reached Kenya.

Kenyan officials have said el-Faisal had traveled to Kenya from Nigeria through Angola, Malawi, Swaziland, Mozambique and Tanzania.

Last week, Kenyan Immigration Minister Otieno Kajwang said it was likely el-Faisal traveled into Kenya by road to avoid detection since he is on an international watch list.

On Sunday, the man speaking to journalists on speaker phone denied he was on an international terror watch list.

El-Faisal arrived in Kenya on Dec. 24, but immigration officials at a border point did not know who he was because a database that has the watch list was shut down while new software was being installed. Kenyan authorities realized he was in the country after a week.

Internet postings purportedly written by a Nigerian man now charged with trying to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner on Dec. 25 referred to el-Faisal as a cleric he had listened to.

The posting was made in March 2005 under the name “farouk1986″ — the year suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was born. Officials haven’t verified that the postings were written by Abdulmutallab, but details from the posts match his personal history.

El-Faisal preached at London’s Brixton mosque in the 1990s before being ejected by mosque authorities because of his support for violent jihad. The mosque was attended at different times by Richard Reid, who is serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison after a failed 2001 attempt to blow up an airplane, and convicted Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui.