Kenyan police have arrested a British national and two Somali women in a raid on a house in an upmarket area of Nairobi which they suspect was being used as a recruitment base for the al-Shabaab militant group.
Detectives surrounded the residence in the north of the city at 10.30am on Tuesday and took away the suspects in handcuffs.
Gigiri is the main diplomatic quarter in Nairobi and is home to several western embassies and the United Nations headquarters in the capital.
Local media reported that police confiscated what they described as “training literature and books”, which they said may have been used to aid recruitment efforts.
A security guard said the British national had lived at the compound for three years and detectives told reporters that he had travelled to Somalia on several occasions.
Kenyan troops have been fighting an al-Shabaab insurgency in the south of Somalia for five years as part of a 22,000-strong African Union force seeking to uproot the group from its main strongholds.
Al-Shabaab has fought back by staging several large-scale attacks in Kenya, including the siege at the Westgate mall in September 2013 that left 71 dead – including four attackers – and a massacre at a university in Garissa last April.
The militants have not managed to stage any major attacks in Kenya in recent months but on Thursday six non-Muslims were killed in an attack on the town of Mandera near the border with Somalia.
