Four men from the Netherlands were arrested at Brussels airport on Thursday after being deported from Kenya. They are suspected of membership of a terrorist organisation.
The four men were picked up by Kenyan authorities on Monday near the border with Somalia. Local authorities in Kenya say that the men, all 21-year-olds, were headed to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab, a radical Muslim group with alleged links to Al-Qaeda.
Three of the men have the Dutch nationality; one is a Moroccan man with Dutch residency.
Dutch police searched two houses in The Hague on Thursday morning; three of the men lived at the same location. A large number of documents was confiscated. The Netherlands has asked Belgium for the extradition of all four suspects.
One of the men, whose first name is Driss, was arrested once before when he and two others allegedly tried to join the jihad in Azerbaijan in 2005. The three men were deported to the Netherlands, but they were not prosecuted.
One of Driss’s fellow travelers, Ramazan Keskin, told NRC Handelsblad at the time that they had been vacationing in Azerbaijan, and were arrested because some of their visas had expired. Keskin, who was 18 at the time, said he and his friends were “naive holidaymakers”.
But his parents said they feared he had been recruited for the jihad. Keskin was a regular visitor at The Hague’s As-Soennah mosque, which has the reputation of being radical.
Al-Shabaab (‘youth’ in Arabic) is a radical Islamic group that controls large swaths of Somali territory and opposes the recognised government of Somalia.
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