Mistaken identity: How activists were arrested on terror suspicion

Three human right activists were on Wednesday night arrested by police in Mombasa on suspicion of being the terrorists who had escaped from the Kamiti Maximum Prison.

The three, Ndung’u Wainaina, Executive Director for International Centre for Policy and Conflict (ICPC) and his two colleagues; Jeremy Opar (programs Coordinator) and Alex Imbula (an office assistant) were arrested while having supper in a restaurant in Mtwapa, Kilifi County.

They had arrived on Wednesday morning for workshop to train women on governance.

They were held for interrogation by ATPU officers at the Mtwapa police station before they were released on Thursday afternoon.

“We were heading for supper at around 7:30pm at the Mtwapa country club, before we even got served, we were suddenly surrounded by 11 police officers from ATPU,” Wainaina said.

Speaking after their release, Wainaina said during the arrest they did not want to cause any scuffle and chose to cooperate with the officers.

“Outside of the hotel we found more officers waiting for us. It was later discovered that one of us was being linked to one of the terror suspects, who had escaped from Kamiti,” explained Wainana.

He said they were all taken in for question for “mistaken identity”

 “We will go to court and seek for damages, the police arrested us without any iota of facts and also failed to book us on the Occurrence Book. We seek to challenge this issue of police arresting people arbitrarily and restraining them without reason,” he said.

Though they were released, he said they were still in fear not knowing whether the ATPU officers would come for them again.

He described their arrest as unethical, unprofessional and illegal and going against the rights of an accused persons, as enshrined in the constitution.

“Any Kenyan who has had an encounter with the anti-terror police must still be living in fear, we have been released yes, but we are not sure until we are sure that they will not come for us again,”he said.

“One of the officers even threatened my colleague Jeremy telling him that you know you can disappear.”

Wainaina stated that they were denied chance to call their lawyers of even a family member and were even illegally questioned without having their lawyers around.

He however remained adamant to respond to questions until Muslim for Human Rights (Muhuri) chairperson Khalif Khelef came in.

“Some of the questions they were asking were about family members and there whereabouts, this was going against the data protection law and in contrast with the right to privacy as outlined in the constitution,” he said.

“They may have destructed our program, but we remain resilient and undeterred, we shall continue with our programs."

Khalif questioned why the three spent the night in police cell even after ATPU officers found no reason to continue detaining them.

He accused the officers for failing to conduct due diligence before arresting the three as he called for the police to always do best practice when dealing with members of the public.

“This amounts to torture and it is illegal, the police did not have any evidence to put the three under arrest,” he said.