Ethiopia frees Kenyan 'Islamists'

Somalia's conflict is viewed by Kenya as a terror recruiting ground

Eight Kenyan men deported to Ethiopia and jailed as terror suspects for more than a year have returned to Kenya.

The eight were imprisoned in 2007 on suspicion of being members of an Islamic militia driven out of Somalia by Ethiopian troops.

Human rights activists and Muslim groups say Kenya's government rounded up and deported terror suspects after thousands of people fled Somalia.

A Kenyan official said all eight had now been returned to their homes.

"Eight Kenyans who had been fighting with Somali separatists and who had been held in Ethiopia were early this morning returned home to Kenya," government spokesman Alfred Mutua said in a statement.

"Investigations have revealed that these Kenyans had travelled to Somalia in 2006 to get militia training and were recruited into terrorist cells by international terrorists operating in southern Somalia," the Reuters news agency quoted him as saying.

'Mass rendition'

But a Kenyan human rights lawyer said he would be encouraging all eight to sue the Kenyan government for deporting them in the first place, the Associated Press reported.

Human Rights Watch, the US-based rights organisation, has regularly voiced concern about Ethiopia's treatment of detainees.

Earlier this week the group said at least 150 men from a wide range of nations had been rounded up close near the border with Somalia after the fall of the Union of Islamic Courts in January 2007.

They were then deported either to Somalia or to Ethiopia.

And a BBC investigation uncovered evidence of the poor conditions endured by detainees at a jail in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, known as "Africa's Guantanamo".

The prisoners there were part of what the BBC investigation termed the first mass rendition of terrorist suspects in Africa.

Mr Mutua, the Kenyan spokesman, insisted that the men were deported to Somalia because they claimed to be Somali nationals. Once in Somalia they were then sent on to Ethiopia.