Kenyan stranding triggered by skin colour: Mohamud

Source: CBC News

A Toronto woman who was stranded in Kenya over false claims she was an impostor said she believes the colour of her skin played a role in her ordeal.

In an exclusive interview with the CBC's Diana Swain, Suaad Hagi Mohamud was asked if she thought things would have been different if she were white.

"I wouldn’t be stopped at the Kenyan airport if I'm a white," Mohamud said.

"The Canadian High Commission wouldn’t be treating me the way they treat me. If I'm a white person, I wouldn't be there in one day. I wouldn't have missed the flight."



Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/08/21/mohamud-interview.html

---

Last Updated: Friday, August 21, 2009 | 6:27 PM ET

I hear they hand them out like candy:

www.kenyanbirthcertificategenerator.com

She is/was Canadian Citizen and was denied to get back to Canada...and she proved it.

...narcissistic racist would only doubt that....

"Mohamud said she was asked to pay a bribe to "make the problem go away."

"They make you miserable, tired, give up, for some money there.""

Pay the bribe and get the heck out of there.

they are not allowed to take bribes -- plus it's clear the CANADIAN consulate is the one that accused her of ID fraud, not the kenyan gov't, she is suing CANADA -- they must have had some kind of alert on her because CANADA voided her passport --given that if she were american she'd prob. be in prison for many years before our gov't realized they had the wrong person, she's prob. lucky she's a canadian -- 8 days in jail when you committed no crime is terrible but americans arrested for shit they didn't do routinely find themselves in hell for years

at NBO i got stopped and got an extra search too but not because of my skin color (i'm white, most kenyans are of course black) or anything else racial but because i did something that looked suspicious (i was using my binoculars to view the area, something i should have realized would look odd)

the guard checked me out, read some of my diary, and laughingly sent me on my way

no one asked for a bribe and indeed, at the time of my visit, you were advised that if anyone hit you up for a bribe to report it to someone else right away

if she paid it, she claims she didn't but who knows, if money changed hands despite what she's saying now, seems like it may have looked a little more suspicious

i don't know what to think of this story, i flew on kenya airways not klm but i've flown on klm plenty and i have no reason to believe that they would stop her for anything except cause -- her passport was voided by the canandian consulate, hence klm would not be allowed to transport her to most destinations

in this article we're only hearing her side of the story and, frankly, it does not sound believable altho i'm willing to stand corrected -- by believable i don't mean i think she did something wrong but i'm confident SOMEBODY did something wrong -- for instance, someone else (maybe a kenyan family member) may have tried in the pass to travel on her passport -- i could share some awful tales of people getting arrested in america after a dirty sibling got arrested using the brother's driver's license

it's kenya, black people fly in and out every day, and the staff (many of whom are themselves black) can perfectly tell whether or not a black person looks like their photo, well, as much as anyone looks like their photo

i hate to be suspicious but for some reason my spidey sense bothers me about this one

i'm finding it difficult to take this article at face value, i think there must be more to it

there are frequent "alerts" at NBO, at times british airways has refused service to nairobi because of suspected terrorist threat, klm and kenya airways continue to fly but use very high levels of security

she may not have liked the security, and it is wearing, but we need to keep in mind that nairobi has suffered some truly terrible attacks, such as the embassy bombing

i might as well come out and say it, i strongly suspect that someone else used her passport or passport information at some point in the past to do something wrong, or travel to canada, and the passport was flagged for her arrest and to be voided -- this could very well have happened without her knowledge, esp. if whoever did this, used her information but created a second copy of the passport -- the real identity thief has moved on and will use a diff passport/diff information next time is my guess -- meanwhile the innocent traveler suffers -- i would be asking if she ever had a passport stolen int he past or ever had her private information exposed in the past

In your comments. Seems to parallel the governments rumors of more behind the scenes than meets the eye.

Woman's lips trapped her in Kenya

Suaad Hagi Mohamud was done in by her lips.

A Kenyan official detained the Toronto woman in Nairobi because her lips didn't match the ones in her passport photograph, according to documents released by her lawyer yesterday.

"I find it really troubling that was the basis of stopping her," said Raoul Boulakia, Mohamud's Toronto lawyer.

Documents submitted in a Nairobi court curtly explain why she was detained: "After a comparison was done, it emerged that although the passenger and the passport holder had the same facial features, that passenger's lips were different from that of the passport holder."

http://www.thestar.com/article/670492

This only became an issue because the Toronto Star kept up the heat on this issue.

Another item.

Stranded, abandoned, abroad

Anab Issa's 25-year-old autistic son, Abdihakim Mohamed, is stuck halfway around the world in Nairobi, Kenya, stateless and without proper care, while she fights to prove he's a Canadian citizen so she can bring him home.

Sound familiar? It's yet another story of a lost Canadian, among scores abandoned by the federal government and dumped among the world's stateless pariahs.

It's been a frustrating, multi-year battle for Issa, and she's terrified for her son's safety. A big man who can turn aggressive when frightened, he's been bloodied by street gangs and harassed by police in Nairobi. "If you run, they shoot at you," she says.

Issa describes how she juggles two $9.30 an hour cleaning jobs to send much needed "bribe" money to Kenya. "Very sad, very desperate," she says, by phone from her Ottawa home. "I am all the time afraid."
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/684984

This issue needs more than innuendo.

may not be identical to Africa, but you always pay the bribe.

Mohamud isn't the only Canadian citizen who's spent time stranded in Kenya over consular denial of citizenship.

was the one asking for the bribe to make the "problem" go away.

this would have been over in a moment. Not that the Canadian govt has been good actors on this, but the bribe was the root cause of the following horrors.

I'm not going to look down my nose at a citizen who got deprived of fundamental constitutional rights by her own government for not committing a crime. I refuse to even twitch down that road.

If you're in a country like Kenya or Nicaraugua and an official, police officer, ticket taker asks you for a bribe, you pay it. That is just protocol.

Just a tip.

It took serious effort on the part of the government to drag this out. They fought, actively, to keep a Canadian citizen from returning to Canada.

They just weren't willing to do anything to help them. Like I said, probably laziness. Anything that requires a modicum of effort is ignored.

The consulate went out of its way to deny her citizenship. They publicly condemned her as a liar and a fraud. They rejected something like a dozen seperate forms of equally valid, official identification. They tried to fight DNA test results that said she was a citizen.

This wasn't laziness. They were very much fighting to keep her there. They did not merely ignore her.

That is strange if true.

This isn't a new thing, even if DU's only just now discovered it.

I want to see where they refused to recognize DNA results.

I don't bookmark everything I read, and this has been going on for awhile. If you think this was just a consular official not doing their job, you don't know what's actually been going on.

Like I said, laziness.

This may come as a shock, but you're allowed to look things up too, and I gave you some nice, obvious sources with lots of articles that those of us who have the first clue about this have been aware of for some time.

But no, just assume I don't know what I'm talking about because I won't give you chapter and verse of a national news story. That's the efficient, unlazy thing to do - after all, why else would your typical DUer refuse to believe or even try to corroborate anything without having someone else do all the work for them?

recognize DNA evidence. I have been unable to find any.