Kenya Court Charges 70 with Being Shebab Members

Seventy men arrested during a raid on a mosque in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa were formally charged Wednesday with being members of Somalia's al-Qaida-linked Shebab rebels, officials said.

Kenyan police raided Mombasa's Musa mosque on February 2, detaining scores of suspects whom they accused of attending a radicalization meeting.

The raid sparked riots in Mombasa in which three people were stabbed, and underscored the mounting religious tensions in the coastal city.

"The suspects were arrested as they planned to perform a terrorist act," prosecutor Onesmus Towett told the court.

"If released on bond or bail they will further an act of terrorism, and there is (an) intelligence report which indicated they were plotting to execute an act of terrorism on unspecified and specified targets," he added.

The 70 were also charged on six other counts: possession of firearms, possession of ammunition, inciting violence, planning to commit a felony, being in possession of illegal material in the shape of Shebab flags and robbery with violence -- on the grounds that some men in the group allegedly wrested an assault rifle from a member of the security forces.

The 70 denied all the charges, and the court is set to make its ruling on whether to grant bail on February 26, 2014.

Security was tight around the court as hundreds of families and relatives jammed the premises to hear the proceedings.

Some 130 people were arrested in the raid. Around 60 of them, several of whom were boys under 12, have been released without charge. The releases followed complaints by families that their young sons had gone missing after the raid.

Police have in the past linked the Musa mosque to recruitment for the Shebab, which is fighting to overthrow Somalia's internationally backed government.

The mosque has had links to several fiery Muslim preachers, notably Aboud Rogo who was shot dead by unidentified gunmen while driving through Mombasa in 2012.

His death sparked two days of rioting in which four people were killed and were churches damaged.

The Shebab claimed the September 2013 attack on Nairobi's Westgate mall, in which at least 67 people were killed.

Shebab sympathizers and sleeper cells have been blamed for a series of deadly but much smaller attacks over the past two years in Kenya. The attacks have been concentrated in Nairobi, the Mombasa area and in eastern and northeastern Kenya near the Somali border.

In a separate hearing on Wednesday in the capital Nairobi, four Somali men charged in connection with a blast last month at the international airport were denied bail after the country's top prosecutor appealed a court decision to release them.

A judge had ruled that the four could be bailed if they paid a bond of $230,000 (170,000 euros) each, but Public Prosecutions director Keriako Tobiko made a fast-track application to the High Court to have the bail decision overturned.

The explosion took place on January 16 at a cafe adjacent to one of the terminal buildings at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the region's busiest transport hub. There were no casualties.

Police initially played down the incident, insisting a "loose light bulb" had fallen into a waste paper basket.