Alwaght-Kenyan police on Thursday announced the arrest of a high-profile terrorist suspect with links to ISIS and al-Shabaab Takfiri terrorist groups.
In a statement, Kenyan police said Ali Hussein Ali -- AKA the “Trusted One” -- was detained “together with his accomplices Ibrahim Absheikh Mukhtar and Abdi Mohammed Yusuf AKA Dader in the southeastern coastal resort town of Malindi. The wanted terrorists were arrested during a sting operation carried out by security agents.
Officers said Ali Hussein was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and visited Kenya in 2010 posing as a tourist before moving to South Africa, Sudan and finally Tripoli in Libya where he was recruited by ISIS.
“He came back to Kenya in 2016 where he became a key agent of ISIS [Daesh] and the Magafe human smuggling and financial network in the country,” a Kenya police statement added.
Ali Hussein was detained while demanding $639,000 from his contact after delivering recruits and illegal immigrants to their destination, police said.
He was also accused of facilitating the travel of recruits from Kenya and Somalia to join ISIS in Libya as well as facilitating illegal immigrants’ entry to Europe via Libya.
Somalia-based al-Shabaab Takfiri terrorists have killed hundreds of Kenyans in recent years and have vowed to continue until Kenyan peacekeeping troops are withdrawn from Somalia.
Meanwhile, two Kenyan trainee doctors on the country’s police list of wanted terrorists have been killed in Libya.
Farah Dagane Hassan, 26 and Hiish Ahmed Ali, 25, who were interns at a hospital before they fled Kenya, died in the Libyan city of Sirte after a raid by the country’s forces against ISIS hideouts there.
Before the trainee doctors fled, investigations linked them to a terrorism network comprising young doctors that was planning biological weapon attacks in the country.
Investigations have unearthed that ISIS terrorist group in Syria has established an international terror network with agents in Kenya, Uganda, Libya, Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia, Niger, Algeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Egypt.
The network relied on a human trafficking ring called the "Magafe network" for the transportation of recruits.