Officers and men of the Kenya Administration Police
MANDERA, Kenya
Dec. 10 (Xinhua)
Kenyan police have arrested a man who
was found ferrying six G-3 rifles and 16
rounds of ammunition at a roadblock in
northern Kenyan town of Mandera near
the border withy Somalia.
Regional Criminal Investigations Officer
Iregi Ngatia said the 53-year-old Somali
national was arrested in Elwak at the
Kenya-Somalia border late on Sunday.Ngatia said the ammunition which were
being transported by a donkey drawn cart were allegedly from Somalia and were being taken past a police road block along Elwak-Kotulo road the common frontier.
“We managed to impound the cart at a
police road block following a tipoff from
a member of the public who had the
information that a Somali alien was
transporting deadly weapons, upon
searching the cart my officers found the weapons,” Ngatia told Xinhua by
telephone on Monday. The weapons were later to be transported by buses headed for Nairobi
According to Ngatia, the deadly weapons were suspected to be used to commit crimes in towns within northeastern and Nairobi. Ngatia said the man who was transporting the weapons is being held at a police station that he did not specify. He
disclosed that the man was being
interrogated so as to give crucial
information on the exact destination of the weapons.
“We believe this is one man who will give us important information that will assist us in unraveling the arms syndicate in this region as we have been losing innocent people from such weapons,” Ngati said.
Two months ago, police in Hagardera
refugee camp recovered an AK-47 gun
and several rounds of ammunition when a man returned them on amnesty. Also late last month some two pistols which had been abandoned in a bush were recovered by a herdsman who later
alerted the police.
Mandera town has repeatedly suffered
both loss of property and loss of lives
through stray bullets and hand grenades
whenever a fighting erupted in Bula-Hawa due to its proximity to the town. There have also been rising fears among
communities living along the porous
border with Somalia that the anti-
government group fleeing from the
imminent military assault on their last
bastion town of Kismayo was likely to turn their frustration on the innocent
civilians in a series of revenge attacks.
Panic recently gripped the border towns of Mandera, Liboi and Amuma over the past month as unconfirmed report from Somalia indicates that the weakened group were withdrawing from port city of Kismayo heading toward the southern part of the war- weary country which borders Kenya, a country whose military invasion to flush out the group had served recurrent terror attacks from the militia since October 2011.
