Two British Muslim teenagers arrested by anti-terrorist police after father alerts authorities

(Telegraph).Two British Muslim teenagers were arrested by anti-terrorist police while trying to get into Somalia after one of their fathers chased them to Kenya and alerted the authorities. 

Mohamed Abdulrahman Mohamed and Iqbal Shahzad, both 18 and from Cardiff, were said to have been trying to get into the war-torn African state to “fight a holy war”.

However, the pair were stopped just six miles from the Somali border after Mohamed’s father, fearing his son had been “brainwashed”, travelled to Kenya and gave pictures of his son to the police. 

Kenyan officials said they had not committed any offences and put the two friends on a plane back to Heathrow airport, where they are expected to be questioned by British police when they land early this morning.

Security officials in Kenya questioned the teenagers over whether they intended to join the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab, which a detonated a car-bomb near the foreign ministry in Mogadishu yesterday. It is not known what the teenagers told police.

The attack was seen as a clear signal of the al-Qaeda-linked Islamists’ intent to fight back against Kenya since it invaded Somalia at the weekend to hunt down insurgent forces it blames for a series of abductions of Westerners. At least four people were killed in the midafternoon attack, including the bomber. Mohamed and Shahzad are understood to have flown to Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, on a Virgin Atlantic flight from London on October 9.

The teenagers were stopped on Sunday just short of the Somali border after passing through the popular tourist resort of Lamu.

The island is 30 miles from where a British man, David Tebbutt, was shot dead and his wife abducted last month, and immediately adjacent to Manda Island, from where a disabled Frenchwoman, Marie Dedieu, was kidnapped from a beach house.

A police source said detectives believed the British teenagers had travelled from Nairobi to the northern town of Garissa before travelling up the coast to the Lamu archipelago.

They were arrested after apparently reporting as required to the local police station in the border town of Kiunga, where they claimed to be tourists.

As the teenagers travelled towards the border, Mohamed’s father, Abdirhman Haji Abdallah, flew to Kenya to raise the alarm.Mr Abdallah said he gave photographs the personal details of his son to police, which were then distributed to guards at the border crossings.Mr Abdallah told the BBC’s Somali Service: “ 

He was brainwashed and taken away from us and he was told that he was going to fight a holy war in Somalia. So I travelled to Nairobi in an effort to save him.“I met a former Kenyan member of parliament on the plane to Nairobi. He linked me up with the Kenyan anti-terrorism police and I passed to them the pictures of my son as well as details including his date of birth.

“With God’s help the authorities managed to arrest my son. “I was told he will be handed over to the British police.” Mohamed, whose mother is believed to be a care home cleaner, is of Somali origin and was born in August 1993.

He is understood to have previously travelled to several other countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Norway and other European destinations. Shahzad, who was born in December 1992, is of Pakistani origin and is believed to have travelled to Saudi Arabia in 2008 to study, although the subject is not known.

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