Kenyan Court awarded 20 year Jail to a teacher for preaching extremism

A court in Kenya has found a teacher at an Islamic school guilty of radicalising his students by teaching them extremism and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.Magistrate Diana Mochache said on Thursday that Samwel Wanjala Wabwile, also known as Salim Mohammed, was found guilty of radicalising the Gotani primary school pupils.

Mochache says Wabwile, who also taught at a mosque in Gotani village in Kilifi county, had been hiding behind religion to promote extremism.

Kenya is battling recruitment of the country's youth by al-Qaida's East African affiliate, Somalia-based al-Shabab, and lately the Islamic State.

To prevent an escalation of Islamic radicalisation in Kenya, it is important that parents inform authorities if their children go missing or show tendencies of following violent extremism, Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njokahad had earlier said.

Kenyan youth make up the largest contingent of foreign fighters in al-Shabab.

Al-Shabab has carried out a wave of attacks in Kenya since it sent its troops to Somalia to fight the militants.
A Kenyan court has sentenced a radical Muslim school teacher to 20 years imprisonment after he told pupils that Christians should be killed, the BBC reported .

Salim Mohamed Wabwire, a convert from Christianity, was a primary school teacher and imam at the Jihad mosque, north of the coastal city of Mombasa. The court in Mombasa acquitted Wabwire of being a member of and recruiting for the militant group Al-Shabab.

The Somali group has carried out numerous attacks in Kenya in recent years, includingkilling 148 students at Garissa University College in northeastern Kenya in April 2015. The university reopened on Monday, nine months after the attack.Kenyan news outlet Standard Digital reported in October that children aged between six and 13 testified against Wabwire, telling the court that the radical preacher told them that members of other religions, including Christians, were deserving of death. “He was teaching us about other religions and told us other religions are kafir (infidel) and we should slaughter them,” a six-year-old child who converted to Islam from Christianity told the court on October 13, 2015, according to Standard Digital. Parents of the children also said that Wabwire secretly converted their children to Islam and extremist ideology.

Kenya has a majority Christian population, with 82.5 percent of the population belonging to a range of Christian denominations. Muslims make up around 11 percent of the population, which numbers around 46 million.