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NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenyan immigration authorities will deport a Jamaican Muslim cleric they suspect has links to terrorism groups, a police spokesman said on Monday.
Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal was in the east African country on a preaching tour but intelligence officials were afraid his speeches would have encouraged radicalism in a country that has suffered two al-Qaeda-linked attacks.
"The minister in charge of immigration has declared him as an unwanted immigrant. We don't want him in this country," police spokesman Eric Kiraithe told Reuters.
"He has known terrorism links and was once jailed in the UK for five years. They are so annoyed with him that they can't even grant him a transit visa on his way to Kingston, Jamaica."
Faisal was also deported from Britain in 2007 for preaching racial hatred and asking his audiences to kill Jews, Hindus and westerners.
"From what he says, he was coming to preach," Kiraithe said.
"The contacts he was maintaining, according to our intelligence, are not the best, are not in our national interests. The contacts were ... in some neighbouring countries."
Attacks in Kenya include a 1998 bomb at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, a hotel bombing and a botched missile attack on an Israeli airliner leaving Kenya's Mombasa airport in 2002.
Some Kenyan Muslim clerics demonstrated against Faisal's arrest on Sunday and said he was going to preach on greater autonomy for Muslims.
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