MOMBASA: A Kenyan primary school teacher who recruited pupils into the militant group Al Shabaab in neighboring Somalia was sentenced to 20 years in jail by a court on Thursday.

 

The judge ruled the teacher, Samuel Wanjala Wabwile alias Salim Mohamed Wabwile, had taken advantage of poverty in the coastal county of Kilifi where school children walk in tattered uniforms without shoes to bait them using incentives like food.

 

The East African nation has suffered a string of deadly attacks by al Shabaab in recent years, which scared away tourists and damaged economic growth.

 

Officials say dozens of youths have crossed into Somalia in the past three years for training by the militants after being recruited and radicalised at home.

 

Wabwile was arrested in June last year and charged with three counts, including being a member of al Shabaab.

 

The court convicted him of radicalising his pupils during Islamic lessons at the school where he taught in Kilifi, contrary to the law on the prevention of terrorism.

 

"The accused preyed on the pupils’ feeble minds to impart his ideological beliefs,” magistrate Diana Mochache said.

 

Al Shabaab is blamed for attacks in parts of Kenya including one in April last year on Garissa University in the east where 148 students were killed.

 

In June 2014, the group killed 65 people over a 24-hour period in and around Mpeketoni in Lamu County.

 

It was also responsible for a raid on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in 2013 that killed 67 people.

 

The group seeks to overthrow the Western-backed Somali government and impose its strict interpretation of Islamic law.

 

It has said it has targeted Kenya because of its participation in an African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia.

 

Meanwhile, survivors of a university massacre in Kenya where gunmen killed 148 people have recounted scenes of terror at a trial of five men linked to the slaughter.

 

The deadly attack at Garissa University in northeastern Kenya on April 2, 2015, was claimed by Somalia’s Al Qaeda-linked Shabaab insurgents.

 

It was the East African nation’s deadliest attack since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi.

 

Four gunmen involved in the massacre were killed, but five others have been charged with 162 counts of terrorism and conspiracy to commit an attack, with the trial underway in the Kenyan capital on Wednesday.