Nation Team
21 June 2009
Nairobi — Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan is Kenya's most dangerous terrorist.
The commander of a legion of foreign fighters in the war on the transitional government in Somalia, he is an old Al-Qaeda hand and has taken part in nearly all successful and foiled attacks against Kenya.
He coordinated the attack on Paradise Hotel in Mombasa in November 2002 and is believed to be the man who fired - and missed - a shoulder-launched missile at an Israel airliner packed with tourists as it took off from Moi International Airport in Mombasa 20 minutes before the explosion in Kikambala.
Embassy bombings
"That's a demented guy, if there ever was one, not so much out of ideology but a misplaced sense of religion," said a senior police officer, who cannot be named, commenting on ongoing anti-terrorist operations.
Though he did not say why the police have failed to arrest him all these years, he said they were keeping a close watch on his activities.
"He is not the kind of man you can afford to take your eyes off for a second," he said, referring to Mr Nabhan's involvement in the operational arm of Al-Qaeda.
On February 24, 2006, the FBI added Mr Nabhan, along with the now deceased leader of the Iraqi insurgency Abu Mus'ab Al-Zarqawi,to its list of most wanted terrorists. The Kenya Police have also put him in their wanted list in connection with the embassy bombings.
Mr Nabhan, along with Harun Fazul, the terrorist mastermind, went to Afghanistan in 1998 and received paramilitary and small arms training at an Al-Qaeda training camp near Khowst.
He fought in the Afghan civil war and the following year was a sufficiently good soldier that he became a trainer. Still in Afghanistan, he trained in bomb making, electronics and surface-to-air missiles before returning to Kenya in 2001.
Last March, a US submarine fired two tomahawk cruise missiles at Mr Nabhan's hideout in Kismayu, but he survived. He spent the year supervising the training of foreign fighters in an Al-Shabaab training camp in the area.
Like most other Al-Qaeda operatives, he fled Mogadishu in 2006 when the Islamic Courts Union was kicked out by transitional government, backed by the Ethiopian army.
Towards the end of last year, he released two videos, one urging volunteers to join the fight in Somalia and the other showing off the Al-Shabaab terrorist training facilities that he ran.
In open-source and other profiles of Mr Nabhan seen by the Nation, he comes across as an ambitious, gifted terrorist. He entered the Al-Faruq training camp in Afganistan at only 19 and three years later became a trainer.
But he is believed to have had a rocky relationship with his boss, Al-Qaeda's top dog in East Africa, Abu Talha al-Sudan, now dead, so much so that he is reported to have asked the leadership of the terrorist group to allow him to mount his own terror operations.
"His relationship with the Pakistan-based leadership has been unsteady in recent years and Al-Qaida probably views Nabhan's ambitions as having outpaced his successes," according to one profile.
His videos, according to the profile, may have been an attempt to show the leadership that he was concentrating on terrorism as much as he was on his many wives.
The absence of Abdullah Fazul, the Comoran terrorist who has been the Al-Qaeda top man in the region and who is believed to be hiding in Tanzania, has given Mr Nabhan a chance to consolidate his leadership of the foreign fighters and stake a claim to the leadership of Al-Qaeda in Somalia.
Mr Nabhan is from a Mombasa family some of whose members are influential.
A man with three wives, he is known to move in and out of Mombasa. It is therefore strange that Kenyan authorities have never succeeded in trapping him.
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