Interpol, the anti-organized crime police, arrested 37 suspected members of terrorist groups in an operation in East Africa during November and December, arresting in Tanzania a suspected terrorist from the Islamic State of Mozambique.
According to the Spanish news agency, EFE, the operation coordinated with Afripol in eight African countries, including Mozambique, allowed the arrest of 37 people in operations to reinforce border posts and identify suspects of crimes related to terrorism.
In the months leading up to the operation, each country drew up a specific plan with national counter-terrorism objectives, including the names and locations of suspected terrorists, which allowed the capture, for example, of a suspect operating in Mozambique but who ended up arrested in Tanzania, where he was hiding.
In Kenya, police arrested 17 people, including two suspected members of the Islamic State, several suspected terrorists from other countries and people involved in financing, propaganda and radicalizing populations.
The eight countries that participated in this operation, sharing information and defining concrete objectives, are Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Djibouti, Mozambique, Somalia, South Africa and Uganda.
Political instability, socioeconomic problems and porous borders create a "propitious environment" for the expansion of terrorist activity, said the acting executive director of Interpol's Police Services, Cyril Gout, quoted by EFE.
For this official, coordinated border control is one of the main weapons in the fight against terrorism, and Interpol provides border officials with databases with information on some 135,000 terrorists and millions of records of travel documents that have been lost or stolen and can be used for criminal activities.
