Secret Prisoner Renditions to Africa, including children…

By Shashank Bengali and Jonathan S. Landay, NAIROBI, Kenya – A network of U.S. allies in East Africa secretly have transferred to prisons in Somalia and Ethiopia as many as 150 people who were captured in Kenya while fleeing the recent war in Somalia, according to human rights advocates here. … The prisoners, who included men and women of 17 nationalities and children as young as 7 months, were held in Kenya for several weeks before most of them were transferred covertly to Somalia and Ethiopia, where they’re being held incommunicado, the groups charge. The transfers, which authorities reportedly carried out in the middle of the night and made public only after a recent court order in Kenya, violated international law, according to the rights groups. They charge that the program is being driven by the United States, which has built a close relationship with Kenya and Ethiopia in the war on terrorism. At least one of the transferees is an American citizen identified on a flight manifest as Amir Mohamed Meshar. Meshar was flown from Nairobi to Baidoa, the seat of Somalia’s transitional government, on Feb. 10, according to Islamic human-rights groups. His whereabouts, and those of 12 other detainees aboard that chartered flight, are unknown.(Read More)