Teens rescued from Nairobi Islamic institute

Kenyan police have rescued 11 teenagers, including at least one Briton, from an Islamic discipline centre where they were chained up and beaten.

Most of those brought out in Monday night’s dramatic raid were Kenyans, but they also included youngsters from Britain, Sweden and Ethiopia.

Relatives had sent them to the Khadija Islamic Institute of Discipline and Education in Nairobi’s Eastleigh estate, police said.

Guleed Ahmed, a 16-year-old from Leicester, told the BBC he had spent eight months at the correctional centre.

“It was a terrible place, they chain both legs and both arms, sometimes hands and feet together,” he said.

“They beat you at lunch time, dinner time and grab both legs and hands and give you lashes on the buttocks.”

Fellow student Abdikalik Jama from Eldoret in western Kenya said he had endured four months of torture and beatings.

“We sleep in chains, eat in chains, go to the toilets in chains. Sometimes we are hooked on the roof in chains and left hanging. We have to memorise the Koran and get punished if we cannot recite the Koran in the classroom.

“Our food was tea and bread in the morning, plain rice for lunch and rice and sugar for dinner,” he told the BBC.

The raid followed a tip-off from one of the teenagers who was himself later rescued from a hospital where he had gone to seek medical help.

Local reports said the police were forced to fire in the air to scare off residents who pelted them with them stones as they raided the centre.

The found the teenagers bound by chains and secured by padlocks in small rooms with little ventilation or light.

A senior Islamic teacher at the school is being questioned. Police told Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper that another 14 staff members had fled.

Nairobi police boss Stephen Kimenchu said the children were sent to the centre by their parents.

“I think the parents believed their children were learning the Koran. I don’t think they were aware of the actual conditions their children were living in,” he said.

Nairobi’s crime-ridden Eastleigh estate is inhabited mainly by ethnic Somalis and refugees from the Horn of Africa.

Local councillor Kullow Ibraim Haji condemned the cruel treatment.

“I support the school and the parents who bring their children here to be taught discipline. But I don’t support torture and chaining of students,” he said. “Islam does not allow children to be tortured. Teaching and disciplining them is one thing – but not torture.”