Kenya arrests controversial Muslim preacher

MOMBASA, Kenya — Kenyan police Sunday arrested a Muslim preacher who had been previously arrested but acquitted of the 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel near Mombasa which killed 15 people.

Aboud Rogo Mohammed, a cleric in Kenya's port city of Mombasa since 1997, was arrested in a raid in the early hours of Sunday morning following a tip, police said.

Police seized firearms, ammunition and detonators in the raid.

"He is expected to appear in court after we are through with our investigations. My officers arrested him in the early hours," said regional police chief Aggrey Adoli.

The preacher was first arrested in 2003, alongside three other Kenyans, accused of involvement in the November 2002 suicide bombing of the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel, but was acquitted two years later.

Twelve Kenyans, three Israelis and three suicide bombers died in the blast.

The preacher is alleged to have introduced Fazul Abdullah Mohammed -- the late head of Al-Qaeda's east Africa cell shot dead last year in Somalia's war-torn capital Mogadishu -- to at least one of the men who helped him carry out the twin US embassy bombings in east Africa in 1998.