Tel-Chai Nation: Cleric who bombed Israeli hotel gets belated punishment at hands of his own ilk

It looks like a Muslim cleric with connections to a terrorist attack in India has met his fate at the hands of other jihadists:

MOMBASA, Kenya (AP) — Hardline Muslim clerics. Young people who feel marginalized. Suspicions that police are responsible for the killings and forced disappearances of extremists.

These elements created a combustible mixture that exploded into rioting last week after Aboud Rogo Mohammed, a Muslim preacher accused of links to an Islamist insurgent group in neighboring Somalia, was riddled with bullets as he drove his wife to a hospital for a checkup. Observers say these events underscore growing fundamentalism in Mombasa, dividing people in a city established centuries ago by Muslim traders from the Arabian peninsula, now home to many people of Arab descent and Somalis.

Mohammed had been jailed for the December 2002 killing of 13 people in a bomb attack of an Israeli-owned hotel on the Kenyan coast and the attempted downing of a jetliner packed with Israeli tourists. He was charged with murder but was acquitted in a trial.

Hassan Omar Hassan, a former deputy head of the government-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, knew Mohammed, and said the cleric became more outspoken and adopted a hardline stance after he emerged from prison.

“It was at that point that I started to hear Mohammed, after imprisonment, becoming more and more audacious. It appears when he was imprisoned he overcame the fear of adversity,” Hassan said. “He started preaching on international jihad, and subscribed broad ideologies of jihad.” [...]

Police said Mohammed had belonged to a terror cell affiliated with al-Shabab that was planning to bomb Kenyan targets over Christmas. Al-Shabab is an Islamist insurgent group in Somalia that has executed people by stoning and chopped off limbs of suspected thieves. Kenyan troops are among the African Union forces backing the Somali government, and are on the verge of attacking al-Shabab’s last stronghold, the Somali seaside city of Kismayo.