NAIROBI Kenya. June 13, 2024 –
-According to Wray, the bad guys are not constrained by the international borders so the good guys should not be either.
The fight against terror and transnational organized crime received a major boost after the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) director Christopher Wray visited Kenya to discuss more areas of partnerships.
Wray has said since the transnational nature of terror and other organized crimes calls for partnerships and strategies, a number of strategies have been put in place to help Kenya successfully investigate and prosecute international terrorism.
The plan involves tooling, equipping and training among other strategies.
This June, Wray said, a team of over a dozen Kenyan investigators will begin undercover training at the FBI Academy in Virginia.
Speaking at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) headquarters where he was hosted by director Mohammed Amin, Wray said the FBI will continue helping Kenya in investigating cases of corruption, narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, money laundering and other organized crimes.
He warned that the threat landscape has expanded considerably and international terrorism remains a serious threat.
As a result, there is a need to identify, investigate and disrupt such planned attacks. The detectives should also react effectively and investigate if they occur.
“The bad guys are not constrained by the international borders so the good guys should not be either,” he said.
The FBI legal attaché program has placed FBI personnel at the US embassy in Nairobi including a special agent bomb technician, a member of the FBI’s counterterrorism fly team, and a Hostage Rescue Team operator embedded on a permanent rotating basis.
“That means that when an act of terror happens, the joint response teams are able to respond immediately with a full range of Bureau expertise,” he said.
He added: “After quelling the threat, well-trained Evidence Response Teams (ERT) are deployed to obtain, secure, analyse and prepare reports that prosecution uses in the courtroom.”
The work of the ERT has been critical in terror-related investigations, as evidenced in records that are available to the general public in relation to the 2013 West Gate Mall attack.
“They establish and maintain liaison with the DCI and other security services, partnering majorly in the fight against international terrorism, cyber-crime and a range of other criminal and intelligence matters,” Wray said.
The FBI boss said there was a need to engage with diverse partners and continuously share information adding that the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) established in Kenya in 2020 had contributed greatly towards counterterrorism in the region.
“The JTTF, which is the first overseas program supported by the US Counterterrorism Bureau, has already achieved that objective,” he said.
According to Wray, the JTTF was established as a multi-agency counterterrorism investigative force in Kenya after the Al-Shabaab terrorists attack on the DusitD2 Hotel in Nairobi on January 16, 2019.
“After the attack, there was a pressing need for a JTTF that could be met through the FBI’s training expertise combined with the State Department Bureau of Counterterrorism’s capacity-building efforts,” he said.
He added that the activated multi-agency approaches have allowed for joint training, allocation of resources, shared best practices and enhancement of capabilities among players, thus thwarting the tactics devised by terrorists and their sympathizers.
The FBI has also been assisting the DCI in fighting other transnational organized crimes through numerous trainings sponsored by the US government.
Most of them have been sponsored through the Anti-Terrorism Assistance program with hundreds of Kenyan detectives and prosecution officers benefitting.
Other high-level trainings have been sponsored and undertaken at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, including a 12-week intensive counterterrorism training offered to 42 Kenyan investigators previously.
The DCI Amin said Kenya is ranked position 16 globally when it comes to organized crimes including money laundering and wash wash businesses where unsuspecting foreigners have lost billions of shillings.
The FBI director said it was important for businesspeople to conduct a good background check of the people they are dealing with, and be conversant with the laws and regulations that guide the type of business they come to conduct.
“It is also a fact that the wash wash business has become one of the most prevalent transnational crimes, more often than not being orchestrated by non-Kenyans in the initial stages,” Wray said.
According to Wray, Kenya, and most specifically its capital, Nairobi, comes into play due to its strategic placement as a key transit route for the precious stones from Congo and other African countries to the United Arab Emirates and the rest of the world.
He added that through concerted efforts, this type of fraud will eventually be brought to its knees.
“We already have existing partnerships and many areas of cooperation, especially through Interpol operations and information sharing that enable us to pursue criminals anywhere across member states,” Wray said.
Wray and Amin said gold scamming had substantially been reduced and revealed that most of it was being perpetuated by rogue lawyers who, among other things, open escrow accounts where once payment is made the money is immediately withdrawn.
“We have so far managed to downgrade the activities of these scammers. Some of them have relocated to neighbouring countries. Out of a total of 71 reported cases, we were able to investigate, arrest and prosecute 64 cases,” Amin said.
Wray also said corruption is among the most important crimes the FBI is investigating and they were working closely with Kenya to investigate such cases.
He said the most important way to demonstrate to citizens in any free society that they can have trust in government institutions is to have agencies like the DCI and the FBI investigating such offences.
“There are incredibly important cases to pursue. We look forward to collaborating more and more with the DCI on that very important front,” Wray said.
The two directors also warned that though the physical space has sufficiently been secured, the extremists have become more adept in the use of technology, including digital platforms.
Extremism, radicalization and recruitment and even sharing attack plans and training manuals are now flourishing in online spaces.
The US is keen on deepening the Kenya-US bilateral partnership given Kenya’s strategic value in addressing regional security concerns like terrorism and piracy.
The US has a military camp at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti which is also located at a strategic point in the Horn of Africa for, among other things, coordinating security and counterterrorism policy.
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