By Daniel Auma

The hidden faces of Kenya’s war on terror may soon be unmasked, as a High Court Judge and a number of Muslim rights groups and lawyers seek to crack the veil of secrecy behind a series of mysterious flights to Ethiopia and the US suspected of carrying out an illegal rendition campaign.

A Kenyan judge has set the stage for a bruising encounter with the country’s anti-terrorism chief on 8 October when Commandant of the Kenya Anti-Terrorism Police Unit Nicholas Kamwende will be quizzed on what he knows about the mysterious airlifts.

The story behind a series of alleged secret flights to lawless Somalia, then to Ethiopia, and finally to US detention facilities, began on 7 January, when a war against suspected Islamic fundamentalists started in Somalia.

At that time, Ethiopian troops were assuming control over the Somali capital Mogadishu after ousting Islamic fundamentalists against a backdrop of US air strikes in south-west Somalia. Ethiopian ground troops were taking part in one of the biggest military operations to be carried out by Washington in East Africa since its humiliating defeat in 1991.

The Ethiopian operation, which enjoyed the support of US intelligence, showed that defeated Somali Islamist militias were fleeing to the port of Kismayo, toward Somali’s southern tip, which borders Kenya.

Kenyan authorities then made a series of arrests as part of a US-backed, four-nation (Kenya, US, Transitional Government of Somalia and US) military campaign in January against Somalia’s Islamist militias, which Bush administration officials have linked to al-Qaida.

At least 140 prisoners – including men and women of 17 nationalities and children as young as seven months – were held in Kenya for several weeks before most of them were transferred covertly to Somalia and Ethiopia, where they were held incommunicado.

According to an Amnesty International report, at least 140 people were arrested by the Kenyan authorities while fleeing from Somalia. Among those arrested, 85 were “unlawfully” transferred to Ethiopia and Somalia, 27 were released from custody in Kenya and transferred to their country, one of them an Omani prince. Four were deported to the US.

Ethiopian authorities have released 15 people since March, while 27 Kenyans are still missing. Four of those sent to Somalia were British citizens and have been deported.

Among the thousands of people fleeing the fighting were two women, Halima Badrudine Hussein and her three children and Sophia Abdul Nasir. As the convoy of fleeing women neared Kiunga, near the border with Kenya, US intelligence was hot on their trail.

Bashir Ahmed Maktal, a Kenyan who had crossed over to the Somali side of the border before the crisis peaked, was also returning home to Kenya at the Liboi entry point.

Amir Mohammed Meshal, an Egyptian-born US citizen, was apprehended at the same crossing by Kenyan authorities and swiftly flown to Ethiopia, where he is facing a military tribunal.

The women and the two men are just a few of the known faces of at least 140 people who allegedly have been brutally interrogated in Kenya, secretly airlifted to Ethiopia and left to languish in Ethiopian cells, from where they have only managed to contact Muslim rights groups occasionally.

But a determined group of Kenyan Muslim rights activists who have vowed to test the east African nation’s legal system and its war on terror have launched a petition against these renditions.

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