'Jihadi brides' to be charged tomorrow

Three girls arrested in El Wak, Mandera County, while allegedly trying to cross to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab as jihadi brides will be charged tomorrow.

Khadija Abubakar Abdulkadir, Maryam Said Aboud from Malindi and Ummulkhayr Sadri Abdulla, a Tanzanian, were arrested by military officers in Wajir in March.

On March 29, Mombasa Senior Resident Magistrate Irene Ruguru allowed police to detain them for 20 days after the State asked for time to launch investigations, which detectives alleged would extend to Zanzibar, Sudan and Somalia.

Initial investigations suggested that they were lured to join jihad in Somalia by a Syrian female contact in September last year with a promise of marrying Islamic fighters.

Yesterday, police sources said they still believed Malindi-born Maryam and Khadija met Ummulkhayr via the internet. She allegedly recruited them into Al-Shabaab with the promise of marrying Islamic holy fighters.

"She had complained about low pay at the hospital where she worked and expressed desire to look for a better job," Maryam's sister Fatma Said told The Standard.

Detectives established that at the time of their arrest, Ummulkhayr was a third year medicine student in Sudan while Khadija was studying pharmacy at Mount Kenya University (Thika Campus). Ummulkhayr was born in 1996 and has been studying at the International University of Africa in Khartoum since 2013, police said.

According to Government records, Maryam was born on December 4, 1990 in Shela Malindi, and studied at Burhani Secondary School in Malindi until 2005 then joined Kenyatta University (Mombasa campus) in 2009.

Reports suggest that they were enticed by the fact that they would eventually end up as widows of Islamic holy fighters in Syria where they hoped to reach through Turkey after flying from Mogadishu, Somalia. Investigators believe that a man by the name Abdulla was the alleged Syrian contact.