(28 Aug 2012) Rioting in Kenya's second-largest city over the killing of a radical Islamic cleric extended into a second day on Tuesday as police fought running battles with youths and one man died when a grenade was hurled into a truck carrying security forces.
Several people were seriously injured in Tuesday's clashes in Mombasa, police and human rights officials said.
The rioting was in response to the killing Monday of Aboud Rogo Mohammed, a man linked to an Islamic extremist group by Washington who was shot to death as he drove in his car with his family.
Human rights groups say the killing fits a pattern of extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances of suspected extremists that are allegedly being orchestrated by Kenyan police.
But police Commissioner Mathew Iteere said that no police officers were involved in Mohammed's death.
It has brought to the surface tensions in this port city established centuries ago by Muslim traders from the Arabian peninsula, now home to hundreds of thousands of people of Arab descent and a large Somali population.
A prison guard was killed when a hand grenade was hurled into a truck carrying security forces sent to quell the riots, said regional police chief Aggrey Adoli. At least 13 police and security officials were seriously wounded, he said.
Adoli said police were forced to keep violent protests from spreading after they led on Monday to the death of one person and the vandalism of two Christian churches and businesses.
"We condemn this act of burning churches right. It is not part of the Islamic tradition," Mordhar Khitamy, Supreme Council of Muslims, Coast chairman said.
Mohammed was recently sanctioned by the U.S. government and the U.N. for his alleged connection to an al-Qaida-linked Somali
militant group, al-Shabab.
He is the fifth alleged Muslim extremist who has been killed or who disappeared in the last four months, according to human rights campaigners.
One corpse was found mutilated and the other four men vanished Mohammed was shot dead as he drove with his family in Mombasa.
His wife was wounded in the leg, said Mohammed's father, who was also in the car along with Mohammed's 5-year-old daughter. He said he and the girl weren't injured.
Police charge that Mohammed had ties to al-Qaida and was part of a terror cell with links to al-Shabab militants that was planning to carry out bomb attacks in Kenya during Christmas.
In January, Mohammed was charged with possession of a cache of guns, ammunition and detonators. He also faced charges of membership in al-Shabab.
Al-Shabab has vowed to carry out a large-scale attack in Nairobi in retaliation for Kenya sending troops into neighbouring Somalia to fight al-Shabab.
The Kenyan government blames al-Shabab for several kidnappings on Kenyan soil, including those of four Europeans. The
kidnappings greatly harmed the Kenya's coastal tourism industry.
Mohammed was acquitted in 2005 of murder charges for the 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned tourist hotel near Mombasa which killed more than 12 people.
In conjunction with that attack, two surface-to-air missiles were fired at an Israeli-owned airliner packed with Israeli tourists as it took off from Mombasa. The missiles narrowly missed.
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