Isiolo, Kenya : Kenya has deployed security agents to its border with Somalia after Islamic clerics announced they had clamped down on the public broadcast of soccer and films, a security official said.
Clerics in the frontier town of Mandera said on Monday they had confiscated a number of satellite TV dishes in a football-obsessed nation ahead of the World Cup because public film dens were corrupting youths.
"Two groups, an undercover team from National Security Intelligence Service and [an] anti-terrorist unit, arrived here on Tuesday night to investigate," a senior local security source who did not wish to be named told Reuters late on Thursday.
Dispatched
The security officer also said another team had been dispatched to Dadaab refugee camp which is home to some 270,000 mostly Somali refugees in the mostly Muslim region.
He said local residents from Mandera, located just a few kilometres from the porous border, claimed Al Qaida-linked Al Shabaab rebels in Somalia had made phone calls to congratulate the clerics. A government spokesman denied the deployment but one leading cleric in Mandera, Shaikh Daud Shaikh Mahmoud, said he had been informed of the intelligence officers' arrival.
