Somalia's hardline al Shabaab rebels denied Friday they had threatened to attack Kenya following a crackdown on Somalis in its capital Nairobi, and said a recording posted on the internet was a fake.| "Please don't kill us!" |
"We didn't threaten Kenya. That story is a false one. We never posted that on the internet ... Everything needs to be checked first by the media to make sure they know what they are writing about," Rage said.
Al Shabaab, which Washington says is al Qaeda's proxy in the failed Horn of Africa state, has verbally threatened to attack Kenya in the past. But anger has been rising among the Somali community in recent days after Kenyan security forces detained hundreds of Somalis living in a Nairobi suburb.
| Wonder why they were detained. Oh, let me guess ... |
| They seem to be angry about lots of stuff ... |
In the online recording, men chanted in Swahili: "God willing we will arrive in Nairobi, we will enter Nairobi, God willing we will enter ... when we arrive we will hit, hit until we kill, weapons we have, praise be to God, they are enough."
But Rage told Reuters that the rebel group, which is fighting Somalia's Western-backed government and wants to impose its harsh version of sharia law across that country, had no idea who was responsible for uploading it to the internet. And he said that al Shabaab's reclusive leader Ahmed Abdi Godane -- also known as Sheik Mukhtar Abdirahman Abu Zubeyr -- had not spoken to the media in the last three months. "So how did he threaten to Kenya?" the spokesman asked.