The troubled life of Rogo’s widow as State links her to terror attack

Haniya Said Sagar, widow of slain Muslim cleric Aboud Rogo in a Mombasa court yesterday. She was remanded for seven days to give police time to investigate alleged links to one of the suspected perpetrators of Sunday’s attack on Mombasa Central Police Station. [PHOTO: Kevin Karani/STANDARD]

Listening to Haniya Said Saggar defend her late husband Sheikh Aboud Rogo reminds older readers of Yoko Ono’s steadfast defence of the late John Lennon.

Lennon, who co-founded the English rock band The Beatles, led a complicated life filled with drugs and women and ended up dying by the bullet.

Haniya, an articulate woman with a heart of steel, defended Rogo’s honour in life and death and came close to losing her own life for that. She was shot in the left leg and left for dead when her husband was killed by assassins on August 27, 2012, and remains wounded to date.

Rogo’s murder, two weeks after the US and UN had placed him on a sanctions list for alleged terrorist funding, unleashed four days of rioting, murder, pillage and arson across Mombasa.

His unwashed body was buried at a local cemetery. His supporters believed they were justified to bury it unwashed to demonstrate he had achieved martyrdom by dying violently in defence of Islam.

Four months later, when she spoke to The Standard, Haniya insisted her husband had achieved martyrdom. “I consider him a martyr because the (Muslim) religion says anyone who dies an oppressive death is a martyr,” said Haniya.

Islamic teacher

Later, she told a journalist she had refused to re-marry to dedicate her life to “teaching madrassa (Islamic school)”, a job she has been doing alongside small scale farming in Kanamai since she became a widow.

Today, Haniya finds herself in trouble with the law again, with authorities claiming she had a hand in last Sunday’s terror strike on Central Police station in Mombasa, through Tasnim Yakub Abdullahi Farah, one of the three women killed in the attack. Detectives claim Haniya communicated with Tasnim prior to the attack and there was some financial transaction between them. Tasnim’s body lies unclaimed at the Coast General Hospital.

Following Rogo’s death, Haniya remained out of the limelight for just four months. She was back in the news when police raided her home in Kanamai to arrest her then 17-year-old son Khubaib.

On November 15, 2012, she protested loudly when Khubaib and Swaleh Abdi Majid were arrested a day after Majid had married Rogo’s daughter Rumaisa for allegedly plotting a terrorist attack on Makupa police station.

Haniya told The Standard on Saturday she believed the state had a conspiracy to decimate her family.

She would later testify before a judicial inquest formed by the government to investigate her husband’s death. After more than two years of testimony and stonewalling, the inquest turned up nothing.

This has been Haniya’s life since 1991 when she married Rogo, an eloquent man she met when both were students at the College of Islamic Studies in Kisauni, Mombasa.

In a past interview, Haniya said Rogo’s problems with the Kenyan law began in 1992 when he identified with the defunct Islamic Party of Kenya as an activist through to 1997. Rogo was arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) agents and Kenya policemen following the August 7, 1997, terror attacks on US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, which were claimed by Al Qaida.

She said her late husband was arrested over claims he had hosted Mohamed Haroon Fazul, who the US had identified as the Al Qaida mastermind of the attacks. The alleged link between the two was that the Fazul was married to Rogo’s cousin.

More trouble for Haniya and her family followed when Rogo was arrested following the November 2002 terror attack on Israeli properties in Kikambala, Kilifi, and attempted shooting down of an Israeli airline which was also blamed on Fazul and Al Qaida.

Rogo was never convicted for these and other charges, leading Haniya to believe the government harboured some hidden vendetta against him. “All these claims were trumped (up) because the government never convicted my husband in any court of law,” Haniya told The Standard in early 2013.

She believed that the state “wanted to make him (look) rich so as to kill him” and added that as early as 2003, Rogo’s family knew that he would be killed some day.

Haniya’s hypotheses were not entirely misplaced for the state’s behavior toward her husband was often baffling. For example, in spite of charging him for terrorism and weapons ownership in January 2012 and claims that Rogo had travelled abroad to plot crime, the government of Kenya still found reason to renew his passport mid 2012.

Other reports indicate that, for most of the time the Kenyan state knew about Rogo’s visits to Tanzania where his family had connections. Haniya added that Rogo’s tours to Tanzania and the Middle East were known to the authorities.

She produced Rogo’s documents including his first and last passports. The documents showed her husband was born in 1969 and received his first passport on May 21, 2001 which expired on May 22, 2010 and a new one awarded mid 2012.

During these interviews Haniya made no attempt to conceal Rogo’s travels and even filled in gaps that journalists thought they had found in some of the papers. For example, she admitted that in 1999, Rogo travelled to Tanzania using “a temporary passport” and denied state claims that her husband had more than one name or identity documents.

But she admitted that during his many appearances in court, Rogo was often “charged under several names and titles” for unknown reasons but which never ended in a single conviction.

Lone ranger

Rogo never used his new passport, going by the lack of markings, stamps and writings in it.

Haniya demonstrated that Rogo travelled out of Africa just once to perform the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca between February 18 and March 2002. The expired passport proved this and Haniya said she accompanied him to the pilgrimage.

Meanwhile, the expired passport also shows that Rogo frequently travelled to a Tanzanian town called Horohoro, between 2002 and 2008 by road through Lunga Lunga border crossing in Kwale and the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

She also travelled to Tanzania several times in Rogo’s company.

Rogo’s widow often describes him as a man who was friendly to everyone but who was misunderstood by many people, including some muslim preachers who accused him of being a “lone ranger in religious circles”.

In spite of the threats Haniya believed Rogo had no intention or reason to flee his home or country because he was fulfilling his duties as a good muslim.

“In 2003, someone warned us that he will be killed but he said he will not run away.... “He felt that as a religious leader he had a duty to speak out,” she said.

Besides physical injury in the shooting that claimed her husband and several arrests, Haniya lamented that she had suffered humiliation and impoverishment that forced her to delay her studies for two decades.