Testimony

The UIC crumbled within days of the Ethiopian intervention, and their leaders fled toward the Kenyan border. So too did many ordinary Kenyans and other foreigners who had been working in Mogadishu. As thousands attempted to enter Kenya the authorities on the border were on the lookout for UIC leaders and terror suspects.

The United States had accused the UIC's leaders of having links to Al Qaeda and claimed that several terror suspects had sought refuge in UIC-controlled areas, including the men who had carried out the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Many of those arrested on the border, says the U.S. official, "had been building bombs, engaged in paramilitary training and had been planning attacks." But among those arrested, the official admitted, were a handful "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Salim, 36, a mobile-phone repairman from the coastal city of Mombasa, was among a group of more than 150 men, women and children rounded up by the Kenyan police. They were taken to police stations in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, where they were held without charge and questioned by Kenyan and U.S. officials, according to Human Rights Watch. Human-rights groups lobbied for their release, but just days before a scheduled court hearing, more than 90 of the detainees (including American, Canadian and British nationals) were secretly flown to Somalia and then onto Ethiopia. Flight manifests, provided to NEWSWEEK, detailed the name and nationality of each detainee. The group included six pregnant women, two of whom would later give birth in jail, and several children, the youngest of whom was a 4-month-old.

Once in Ethiopia, many of the detainees were subject to physical abuse carried out by the prison guards, according to the Kenyan men. Bashir Hussein Mohammed, a 50-year-old grandfather, says he was beaten repeatedly with an iron bar across his back, legs and face for refusing to follow orders. After six weeks of daily beatings he gave up. "I had no power," he told NEWSWEEK. "I was dying."

Dozens were taken every day to the villa where they were asked by people—identified by the Kenyan men only as "Americans"—asked what they had been doing in Somalia. Some were quickly dismissed. Abdullah Tondwe's interrogation lasted less than an hour. "One of the Americans said, 'this is nonsense.' They said I shouldn't be there," Tondwe said.

Salim was questioned for more than two months, he says. But at the end of May two men who identified themselves as CIA agents told him, "We're sorry—you're innocent," Sailm recalled.

While Salim and the other seven men were being held in an Ethiopian jail, they said that the Kenyan government refused to acknowledge their citizenship and claimed that the men had all said they were Somalis, which the detainees denied. A Kenyan government spokesman called these charges "wild and unverifiable" and denied that the Kenyan government deported Kenyans to Ethiopia. In any case, all eight men were released without charges in October 2008. After being reunited with their families and receiving a medical checkup, the eight Kenyans have begun to think about the future. Some have lost their homes. "We are starting from zero now," says Tondwe, sitting in Mombasa's Mewa hospital. "It's like we are born again."

© 2008