In an echo of Guantanamo, the US is using secret east African prisons to render terror suspects captured in the Horn of Africa.
Zanzibar-born translator Kamilya Tuwein, who lives in the UAE, told The First Post in an exclusive interview how she was captured in northern Kenya on suspicion of being a member of al-Qaeda.
"I was in Kenya in a hotel on January 10 when police broke into the room with guns and arrested me. They took us to Mombasa, then Nairobi. When I arrived they said 'Welcome al-Qaeda'."
According to Kamilya she was then flown at night to the Somali capital Mogadishu where she was kept in an internment camp for ten days at a time when Ethiopian forces were invading the country.
Since December 2006 the US has opened up an African front in its war on terror - centred around Kenya, |
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Ethiopia and Somalia - and caught many innocents in the crossfire.
Central to the new strategy is the use of Ethiopian jails in the rendering and interrogation of terror suspects. Hundreds of these have been held incommunicado by the Ethiopian and Kenyan authorities on suspicion of terrorism, according to US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).
They accuse the US of complicity in the maltreatment of these detainees in what the UK legal rights charity Reprieve has denounced as 'Africa's Guantanamo', using Ethiopia as an erstwhile ally in its invasion of neighbouring Somalia late last year.
US special forces, along with Kenyan and Ethiopian authorities, have also been arresting suspects along the Kenyan/Somali border since December 2006. An unknown number have been sent to Ethiopia.
In March Ethiopia's Foreign Affairs Ministry acknowledged that 41  |
