A SUSPECT in the bombings of US embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Kenya begged South Africa in 1999 to hand him over to the United States rather than send him home to Tanzania, the Cape High Court heard this week.
Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, a 27-year-old Tanzanian Muslim, is asking the court to rule that his arrest by South African immigration authorities in Cape Town and subsequent handover to the US FBI was unlawful.
Mohamed is being held in the state of New York in the United States, where he faces the death penalty for his alleged role in the 1998 twin bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed 224 people.
But lawyers for the South African goverment said Mohamed had protested that countrymen would kill him in revenge for the Dar-es-Salaam bombing if he were deported to Tanzania, SABC public radio reported.
The South African constitution did not allow authorities to send somebody to a country “where he might have been killed by mobs as he stepped off the airplane,” lawyer Henry Viljoen said.
Mohamed is one of four alleged members of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden’s “terrorist” organization charged with the embassy bombings, which also injured more than 4 000. He was arrested in Cape Town in 1999 without a passport.
His lawyers have argued that the South African authorities did not follow proper extradition procedures before handing him over to the United States, but instead treated him as an illegal alien.
An advocate representing two human rights agencies that support Mohamed’s application, Anton Katz, said the state had however not complied with the regulations of the Aliens Control Act.
The act says an illegal alien shall be removed to either the country whose passport he holds, or of which he is a citizen.
Officials therefore “do not have any discretion to remove a person to a different country,” Katz said.
Mohamed’s lawyers have also asked the court to order the South African government to request the United States not to impose the death penalty.
Mohamed has cited President Thabo Mbeki and the ministers of foreign affairs, home affairs and justice, as well as the director of public prosecutions as legally responsible. – AFP
ZA*NOW:
Embassy bombing man arrested in SA October 10, 1999