Suspected jihadists were top students in high school

Kenya: As the shock of three women arrested in El Wak on Friday on alleged jihadist mission in Somalia and Syria sinks, The Standard sought some background information about two of the alleged terrorist suspects.

Detectives believe Malindi-born Maryam Said Aboud and Khadija Abdulkadir from Malindi met Zanzibar student of medicine Ummul Khayr Sadir Abdullah on an internet chat room who allegedly recruited them to Al-Shabaab with the promise of marrying Islamic holy fighters.

The notion that middle-class and well-educated women could contemplate joining a violent movement, as claimed by police, has challenged the traditional belief that only poor, uneducated, wild-eyed youngsters can be brainwashed.

Ummul Khayr is a third-year medicine student in Sudan while Khadija is a Bachelor of Pharmacy student at the Thika campus of Mount Kenya University.

According to police, Ummul Khayr was born in 1996 and has been studying at the International University of Africa in Khartoum since 2013.

Maryam was born on December 4 in 1990 in Shela Malindi, according to Government records, and studied at Burhani Secondary School in Malindi until 2005, then joined Kenyatta University (Mombasa campus) in 2009.

We were unable to find Maryam's records at Kenyatta University's campus in Mombasa but were able to do so at Burhani where we discovered she scored a  B+ in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education exam in 2008 and enrolled for a bachelor's degree in Commerce.

School principal Luka Kasili told The Standard yesterday that there are records to show that a student by that name "studied here and was admitted to Burhani Secondary school on February 2, 2005, after leaving Tahdhib Muslim Primary School in Malindi."

Kasili said records show she was admitted as the 19th student at the school that had just been launched, but added he could not speak about Maryam's other attributes as he was not at the institution at that time. He said the student was Index number 1 and scored grade B in  the KCSE exam in 2008.

Khadija was born in Malindi on May 22, 1994, and studied at Tawir Secondary School in Malindi after graduating from Tahdhib Muslim Primary School in 2012.

Tawir Secondary School deputy principal Abdul Wahid disclosed he taught Islamic Religious Education to a student who went by that name.

"She was our student who left in 2012," said Wahid, adding that she scored a B in KCSE in 2012.