Kenyan Police, Muslim Youth Clash in Mombasa
Kenyan police and Muslim youths clashed in Mombasa following Friday prayers, witnesses said, days after a firebrand Islamist cleric was gunned down in the port city.
Security was tight and tensions high around the Musa mosque, seen by Kenyan authorities as a terrorist propaganda hub and recruiting ground for jihadists.
A prominent cleric closely associated with the mosque, Abubaker Shariff Ahmed better known as Makaburi, was shot dead in Mombasa on Tuesday.
Makaburi was a vocal supporter of al-Qaida and Somalia's Shebab rebels and prior to his death had accused Kenyan security forces of seeking to kill him.
After Friday's prayers, worshipers and police fought brief running battles including stone-throwing and the use of tear gas.
Agence France Presse reporters at the scene said the protesters quickly dispersed amid a massive security presence, and that preachers at the mosque had appealed for calm.
"When our sheikhs are being killed they (the police) are just there, they are just looking, but they are not doing anything. We as a Muslim society just want peace," one worshiper told AFP after the prayers and before the brief clashes broke out.
Makaburi was on a U.N. sanctions lists and accused of being a "leading facilitator and recruiter of young Kenyan Muslims for violent militant activity in Somalia", and of having "strong ties" with Shebab leaders.
The cleric, who was in his 50s, had also openly praised the suicide commandos who stormed Nairobi's Westgate mall in September last year, massacring at least 67 people in a four-day siege that was carried out in retaliation for Kenya's intervention in Somalia to fight the Shebab.
In August 2012, radical preacher Aboud Rogo Mohammed was also gunned down, and in October last year his successor, Sheikh Ibrahim Ismail, met the same fate on a road near Mombasa, again sparking riots.
On Friday, Human Rights Watch said Kenya must carry out a thorough investigation into Makaburi's killing or else risk an escalation of religious violence.
"Gunning down clerics in the streets is only making a bad situation worse," said Leslie Lefkow, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
"The authorities need to put an end to this cycle of violence, and they should start by finding out who is behind these killings and prosecuting them."
Source: Agence France Presse
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