Two medical students with links to ISIS terror group arrested at Malindi Hospital

Mohamed Shukri Yerrow (left) with Abdulrazak Abdinuur (right)

Two medical interns at the Malindi hospital, Kilifi County were over the weekend arrested for allegedly having links to terror group ISIS.

The two identified as Mohamed Shukri Yerrow and his associate Abdulrazak Abdinuur were arrested on Sunday night by a team of Anti-Terror Police Unit who had been tipped off.

They are both medical interns studying medicine at Saratov State Medical University in Russia.

It is not clear how and why police linked them to the terror group.

Four interns were arrested from the same hospital in 2015 for planning to join ISIS.

Maryam Said Aboud, Khadija Abdulkadir Abubakar from Malindi and Ummul Khayr Sadir Abdalla from Tanzania and Halima Adan Ali were charged in court and their case is ongoing.

Initial investigations have revealed that Yerrow is part of the earlier ISIL recruitment network that was discovered by police and who had been working on plans of using Anthrax to launch terrorist attacks.

The two students have been evading police dragnet and were intending to relocate to Puntland in Somalia to join the ISIS cell in Somalia that is under Sheikh Muumin, police handling the issue said.

“The two were planning to acquire fake travel documents to facilitate their escape to Somalia,” said another officer who cited informers.

Arrest of the two comes two months after another medical Intern Mohamed Ali Abdi was arrested in Wote hospital Makueni County for conducting clandestine online recruitment to ISIS and being engaged in planning an anthrax attack.

There is growing concern that ISIS/ISIL is targeting young Kenyans particularly graduates in different fields such as medicine, engineering, computer science for recruitment into terror activities.

When Ali was arrested in April, police boss Joseph Boinnet said he had been engaged in active radicalisation and recruitment of university students and other youths into terrorism networks.

The suspects were planning large-scale attacks akin to the Westgate Mall attack with the intention of killing Kenyans. Ali's network also included medical experts with whom they planned to unleash a biological attack in Kenya using anthrax," said Boinnet.

Fighters from al Shabaab decamped the group led by Sheikh Muumin to create a small pro-ISIS group in Somalia. The defections have created greater enmity between the two factions. According to reports, a cell of the ISIS in Somalia has grown in size by a factor of five in just nine months.

The group had just 20-30 members when it was founded in October 2015, but has now grown to between 100-150 fighters in one region.