Law student who found escape route in Shabaab

Who brainwashed Abdirahim Abdullahi to the extent of not graduating after attending Law classes for years at the University of Nairobi? PHOTO | BD GRAPHIC 

By John Kamau

In Summary

• Who brainwashed Abdirahim Abdullahi to the extent of not graduating after attending Law classes for years at the University of Nairobi? His sister thinks somebody did that.
• Ababmo to his friends, who was only 26 when he was felled during the attack that left 148 dead at Garissa, was a lover of books and football. ‘Merchant of Venice’ by Shakespeare was one his best collections until he turned to be a merchant of death, instead.
• Immediately he joined university, he complained that classes and lecturers were boring and swore that he was looking for an escape route.
• Did he find one such route in terror cells and returned to attack his country?

What else would it take to ponder in time when to fall over one’s self in awe, love, joy and fulfilment?
-Garissa killer, Abdirahim Abdullahi, November, 10, 2009.

Sixty-four months after he wrote those apocalyptic words on his Twitter account, he lay dead on the concrete floor of Garissa University College from an unseen gun wound. He was still dressed in a stripped shirt and straight leg chinos. Two pieces of his stripped shirt lay near the crouched elbow atop some caked blood.

Abdirahim Abdullahi, who read Law at the University of Nairobi, was not the classic terrorist, although he wore the trademark flak jacket, and was armed with an AK-47. He was middle-class and had worked briefly for a local bank. He was a social freak.

The General Service Unit Recce unit sniper appears to have caught him before he triggered the suicide vest — if he had any. A few spent catridges lay by his side — his recognisable face facing the left. Ababmo, as fellow students fondly called him, was no more.

Abdullahi is thought to have joined the militant Al-Shabaab group in 2013 while still at university. According to a CBS news report quoting senior university administrator Noel Manyenze, Abdullahi never graduated for there were “pending issues with his transcript.”

Also, during his last year at the university, his lecture attendance record dropped to a 20 per cent low and became a C and D student.

He hardly updated his Twitter account and when he did it was full of lamentations. “Some lectures are natural bores. Lookin 4 an escape route.... This boredom’s drilling into my bones *sigh*” he wrote in 2009, the year he entered the university.

“What I can vividly remember is that in high school we used to play football together and we used to call ourselves “Team C”. We were not talented footballers but we played for fun during games time in the evening that was 2004-2006,” recalled his friend, Ali Al-soomal, in a Facebook post.

Abdullahi’s elder sister, Ifrah, says their brother loved football and books. His best was the classic, William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Another fellow student at the Law School, Gerald Kiti, saw him as a “vibrant, lively... and a generally cool person…For Ababmo to be associated with a terrorist attack... it’s astonishing, it’s very surprising.”

Son of Abdullahi Daqara, the Chief of Bulla Jamhuri in Mandera County, he was reported missing to the authorities last year by his father. He feared that his son, a former student at Wamy High School in Nairobi, could have crossed over to Somalia. He would call his father and terminate calls once asked about his location.

A sharp dresser, he is thought to have got first links to Al-Shabaab while in either Second or Third year. But at university, according to his friends — and apart from the irregular class attendance — there were no signs that he had become a terror recruit.

January 2009 had witnessed significant changes in Somalia. Ethiopia had pulled out its troops from Somalia and a UN-brokered peace process had led to the establishment of the Transitional Federal Government headed by Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, a former leader of the Islamic Courts Union.

There was frenzy of calls from Jihadists and from Osama bin Laden calling for the removal of President Ahmed and the group accelerated its recruitment and attacks inside Somalia.

In the next year, Al Shabaab carried multiple suicide bombings in Uganda which was part of the Amisom troops station in Mogadishu.