Sheikh Rogo task force that hit brick wall

By David Ochami

Mid December last year the task force probing the late Sheikh Rogo’s death on August 27 invited new leads to his killing.

After three months of inaction the task force, led by State Counsel Jacob Ondari, admitted it had run into a brick wall because witnesses had not turned up to describe the killing or identify suspects.

Ondari admitted last week the task force needs additional information to make a breakthrough. He then disclosed that contrary to popular belief, the task force does not actually investigate the events leading to Rogo’s killing because it is mandated only to “guide police in the investigation, not to carry out any investigation”.

There have been reports that there is a ‘cold war’ between these two teams, a claim Ondari denied without stating why his task force was looking for witnesses or what assisting police entails.

Ondari and his entourage were also edgy when probed over possible foreign links to Rogo’s killing following claims he was a terrorist on the pay roll of Al Qaeda and its affiliates. As he admitted not to have perused the late Rogo’s travel documents as a possible hypothesis an unnamed taskforce member muttered audibly that “there is no need to pursue that lead”. “If these documents are brought to us by any sources we will look at them,” said Ondari disclaiming any knowledge that the late Rogo had owned two Kenyan passports in his life including one renewed a few months before his death.

The State Counsel also admitted that his task force had not investigated the deceased’s foreign travels including to Tanzanian towns, which Sheikh Rogo frequented.

Nevertheless investigations by The Standard On Saturday disclosed that despite the acrimony with the late preacher, Kenyan authorities dutifully gave him a Kenyan passport in the 1990s.

After charging him for terrorism and weapons ownership in January, the Government still found reason to renew his passport mid 2012 lending credence to his widow’s hypothesis that “all these claims were trumped up because the Government never convicted my husband in any court of law”.

Describing themselves as poor people, Haniya Said Saggar, Rogo’s wife, now claims the Government or its agents invented myths to make her husband “look rich in order to kill him” and adds that she can account for all her and her husband’s travels abroad, especially in the Middle East and Tanzania.

According to documents released by Haniya, Rogo received his passport on May 21, 2001. It expired on May 22, 2010 and a new one awarded mid- last year.

These documents show Rogo was born in 1969.

There is no writings or markings in the second passports indicating Rogo had not used it, claims contradicted by intelligence officials who maintain he travelled to Somalia many times this year and last year.

Significantly, Haniya admitted in a recent interview that her late husband has travelled before without documents including to Tanzania in 1999 “using the temporary passport”.

Intelligence sources suggest Rogo had multiple ID papers and travelled under several aliases. And his widow admits that during his many times on trial “he was charged under several names and titles”.

So why did Sheikh Rogo travel to Tanzania in 1999? “We were trying to engage in business but we failed,” according to Haniya who alleges that the couple settled in Dar es Salaam where Rogo, tried his hand in coconut trade, a butchery and restaurant and returned to Mombasa after the businesses collapsed.

Muslim pligrimage

According to Rogo’s passport, he travelled out of the continent only once attending the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca between February 18 and March 2002.

Haniya says she accompanied him on this trip. The first passport shows that Sheikh Rogo made frequent trips to a Tanzanian town called Horohoro, between 2002 and 2008 often by road through Lunga Lunga border crossing and also through the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

Haniya also travelled to Tanzania several times in Rogo’s company. One significant trip was in 2010 when she went to Bagamoyo for six months. On this trip, Rogo escorted his wife and family up to the Lunga Lunga crossing.

She says she took this trip to be close to one of her students at the Islamic school in Kanamai who “requested special tuition from me and I was in Bagamoyo for six months”.

Meanwhile, Haniya has disclosed that Rogo’s problems with the Government began when he actively participated in the activities of the defunct Islamic Party of Kenya (IPK) through to 1997 following the August 7 [1997] terrorist attack on US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi “when FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigations) and Kenya policemen arrested us.”

She says that police claimed at that time that her late husband had hosted Mohamed Fazul, alleged mastermind of the August 7, 1998 attack on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, at Siyu and married him of to his (Rogo’s) cousin.

She also claims following her husband’s acquittal over the 2002 bombing of Israel properties on the Kenyan coast, mainstream Muslim preachers tried to co-opt him into their circle but failed.

“He was friendly to everyone but some leaders accused him of being a lone ranger in religious circles,” she said adding that in 2003 the family began to actively receive threats to kill Rogo. “In 2003, someone warned us that he will be killed but he said he will not run away.”

Despite these alleged threats, she stood by her man believing he was fulfilling the role of a good Muslim and even justified her late husband’s immense risks. “He felt that as a religious leader he had a duty to speak out,” she says.

Besides physical injury in the shooting that claimed her husband, Haniya says he has suffered in many other ways including delaying her studies by close to two decades as well as what she believes is a new onslaught on her children through terrorism charges.

According to her recollection, she and Rogo met at the Kisauni College of Islamic Studies where both were studying for a bachelor’s degree in Islamic studies before her future husband dropped out “due to poverty”.

They married shortly afterwards and family life and her husband’s legal problems disrupted her learning too until 2011 when “I finally finished my bachelor’s degree”.