Police pursuing killers of powerful trader in Mombasa

Mombasa, Kenya: A controversial businessman was on Friday evening shot dead near Moi International Airport, Mombasa, about 200 metres from Changamwe Police station. The gunfire sparked panic that the police station was under attack. Police officers opened fire fearing they were under attack.

By Saturday the killers had not been arrested nor had their motive been determined, according to Mombasa Police commander Robert Kitur. He said witnesses appear not to have captured the registration numbers of the assassins’ car.

“We are still investigating and pursuing these people,” said Mr Kitur, who added the assassins were in a car and “appear to have avoided the highway when they were escaping to evade police roadblocks and took an escape route near the police station.”

On Saturday, Kitur said officers at the station initially thought they were under attack as happened recently at Gamba Police Station,Tana River County.

A man and his son were hurt outside the station when bullets were sprayed at their car near the police station.

Some bystanders claimed the boy was shot by police bullets but Kitur said the infant was shot by the assassins who believed his father was a policeman chasing them.

Although not an imam, Shahid Butt, a Mombasa-based trader born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1956, was a prominent and controversial figure within Muslim circles.

The State was preparing to press terrorism charges against him later this month.

A top judicial official told The Standard on Sunday the State had lined up six witnesses to prove Butt’s alleged links to terrorist funding.

Through his vast financial empire and as a trustee of the Muslim Association, Butt had immense influence.

Devout Muslim

Anti-terrorism police had beginning mid last year accused him of sponsoring radical Islamist takeover of Sakina and Musa mosques.

Yesterday, his lawyer Ngachaku Gakui dismissed these claims and disclosed that Butt was never a Muslim fundamentalist and had recently returned from Germany.

“My client was a devout Muslim but not a fundamentalist and could not go out of his way to fund radicalism,” said Gakui. He said Butt has been under investigation over radicalisation of Muslim youth in Mombasa, especially after the violent ouster of moderate imam Sheikh Mohamed Idris from Sakina mosque in October last year.

The Muslim Association owns the Sakina Mosque, a hotbed of radical Islamic ideology since the early 1990s. In October last year, Idris was ousted from Sakina by radical supporters of the late radical islamists Sheikh Aboud Rogo and Sheikh Abubakar Sharif alias Makaburi.

Sheikh Idris, who was also chairman of the Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya, fell out with radical Islamists for opposing extremism.

Sheikh Idris blamed Butt for his ouster and sued the association. By the time he was killed in Likoni, Mombasa on June 10, the association was trying to reinstate him.

Coincidentally Shahid Butt was killed by an assassin’s bullet, exactly a month and a day to the date his long time rival Idris was killed. He was travelling with his son during the incident when he was shot about 25 times.

The son, who had landed from India, was spared. Shahid who owns Modern Coast, a leading bus and trucking company, had just picked his son at the airport when men in a blue Toyota Probox opened fire on his car at 8pm.