The Somali Federal Government is hoping Kenya will agree to transfer 122 convicted Somali pirates from Kenyan jails back to Somalia.
Somalia’s ambassador to Kenya, Mohammed Ali Nur, told Radio Ergo in a special interview that if an agreement is reached, over 122 convicted Somalis serving prison terms in Mombasa for piracy related offences would be repatriated to Somalia to serve out the remainder of their sentences in Somali prisons.
Some of the pirate prisoners are serving jail terms of between five and 20 years, the ambassador said.
They are complaining of bad living conditions in the Kenyan prisons and have requested to be transferred back to Somalia.
“I visited them in a Mombasa prison recently. Some of them are recovering from injuries they sustained on the high seas, others have got bullets in their bodies and need surgery, while others are suffering from illnesses like diabetes and hypertension,” the ambassador said.
He added that the Somali embassy was pushing hard to get an agreement with the Kenyan government soon.
Relatives of some of the pirate prisoners had also been pressurising the embassy to speed up the process of bringing the convicts back.
Speaking about the repatriation process of Somali refugees in Kenya, meanwhile, the ambassador told Radio Ergo that negotiations were moving on smoothly and that the Somali government, in collaboration with international aid agencies, was engaged in improving social services and security in areas liberated from the Al-Shabaab militant group, before the start of any repatriation exercise.
He said thousands of Somali refugees had voluntarily returned to their country with the help of the embassy in Nairobi, which had issued travel documents for them. Many others had approached the embassy and were willing to go back home.
