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Feared Somali police chief packed peas for Tesco
Last updated at 10:45 PM on 24th May 2008
The man in charge of one of Africa’s most feared secret police services worked in Britain for Tesco until 18 months ago.
Mohamed Warsame Nur ‘Darwiish’, who has been accused of war crimes in conflict-ravaged Somalia, was employed through an agency to drive trucks and pack peas at the supermarket giant’s depot near Daventry, Northants, until late 2006.
Now he is General Darwiish, head of the National Security Agency (NSA), the Somali equivalent of the CIA, which is responsible for detaining and interrogating terrorist suspects.
The agency is accused of unlawfully imprisoning and torturing hundreds of citizens and launching many other repressive security operations.
Accused: General Darwiish in Somalia where he heads the secret police
An investigation by The Mail on Sunday’s Live magazine and a Channel 4 Dispatches programme discloses that his family still live in subsidised housing in Leicester.
The investigation found that he is one of several Somali leaders linked to allegations of war crimes who have close links to Britain.
Some members of the Somali government are believed to have even been given British citizenship, state benefits and a subsidised home in this country.
All regularly commute between Somalia and their homes in Britain, where their families remain while they fight for the UK-backed President, Abdullahi Yusuf, who is accused of waging a tribal war.
The president himself has links to Britain – in 1996, his life was saved by a liver transplant at London’s Cromwell Hospital. He comes back for regular check-ups, staying with relatives in Kilburn, North-West London.
Somalia’s deputy police chief, Ahmed Hashi Tajir, originally from the Netherlands, spent six years living in Birmingham, where he worked for a car parts firm.
His family remain in Spark Hill in Birmingham, where they receive child tax credit because his police salary – which is also subsidised by Britain, via a UN programme – is low.
He said: ‘I was in Birmingham for six years. It is more open than Holland. England more open, yeah. And I was getting very, very good pay – £1,500 every four weeks.
Plus attendance allowance. Plus quality bonus. Plus child tax credit.’
Former Somali interior minister Mohamed Guled Ga’amadheere is a British citizen, with a home and family in Leytonstone, East London.
In 2007, he ordered that no international aid was to be distributed without undergoing a government inspection, an action the UN claims unnecessarily obstructed more than a million refugees receiving food and medical care.
The former military chief of staff, the president’s spokesman and others are also thought to have families and homes in the UK.
