{"id":12011,"date":"2014-04-09T13:06:24","date_gmt":"2014-04-09T13:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=12011"},"modified":"2014-04-09T13:06:24","modified_gmt":"2014-04-09T13:06:24","slug":"kenya-sends-back-illegal-somalis-after-nairobi-raids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=12011","title":{"rendered":"Kenya sends back ‘illegal’ Somalis after Nairobi raids"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Police<\/a>
Police say they are screening Somalis to find out their legal status<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kenya has sent back 82 Somalis to Somalia after launching a massive security force operation to flush out illegal immigrants and militant Islamists.<\/p>\n

The group had been in Kenya illegally, a Somali diplomat said.<\/p>\n

Nearly 4,000 people have been arrested in raids over the past week in the capital Nairobi, but police say only 447 people are still being held.<\/p>\n

Somali militants have carried out a wave of attacks in Kenya since 2011.<\/p>\n

The security operation has focused on Eastleigh, a mainly Somali neighbourhood in Nairobi.<\/p>\n

At least six people were killed in grenade explosions in Eastleigh on 31 March.<\/p>\n

‘Mop up’<\/strong><\/p>\n

No group said it carried out the attack.<\/p>\n

However, Kenya’s government believes that Somalia’s militant Islamist group, al-Shabab, operates in Eastleigh, and has support among some Somalis living there.<\/p>\n

Those arrested included women and children. They were taken to a sports stadium and various police stations to be interrogated and for their legal status to be checked, correspondents say.<\/p>\n

“We have arrested almost 4,000 people in this operation,” Kenya’s Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku is quoted by Reuters news agency as saying.<\/p>\n

“For the last few months we’ve had heightened insecurity. Time has come for a mop up to restore order,” he added.<\/p>\n

The operation has been condemned by some leading Kenyan MPs and religious clerics who have accused the security forces of unfairly targeting Somalis.<\/p>\n

Somalia’s ambassador to Kenya, Mohamed Shake Ali, confirmed to the BBC that 82 people had been deported.<\/p>\n

On Monday, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said it had been denied access to refugees and asylum-seekers who had been arrested.<\/p>\n

Last month, Kenya’s government ordered all Somali refugees living in towns to move into designated camps in a bid to end militant attacks.<\/p>\n

On 24 March six people died in an attack on a church near the port of Mombasa.<\/p>\n

In September, at least 67 people were killed after al-Shabab militants took control of the Westgate shopping mall in the capital Nairobi for four days.<\/p>\n

Somalia has been been hit by instability for more than two decades, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee to Kenya.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kenya has sent back 82 Somalis to Somalia after launching a massive security force operation to flush out illegal immigrants and militant Islamists. The group had been in Kenya illegally, a Somali diplomat said. Nearly 4,000 people have been arrested in raids over the past week in the capital Nairobi, but police say only 447 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":12013,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-12011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}