‘Kenya used force to put Taiwanese on plane to China’

TAIPEI (Reuters) — Kenyan police broke through a police station wall and threw tear gas to force a second group of Taiwanese on to a plane bound for China yesterday, Taiwan’s foreign ministry said, in a bizarre diplomatic row in which Taiwan has accused China of kidnapping.

But a senior Kenyan official said the “people” were in Kenya illegally and were being sent back to where they had come from.

Taiwan on Monday accused China, which regards the selfruled island as a breakaway province, of kidnapping eight of its nationals, who it said had been acquitted in a cyber crime case in Kenya, and deporting them to China on Friday from the Nairobi district of Kilimani.

It said China had pressured Kenyan police to put the eight on the plane. China said at the time it was seeking further information.

” These ones were people who were here illegally and they were deported back to the place where they had come from,” Mwenda Njoka, spokesman for Kenya’s Interior Ministry, told Reuters by telephone yesterday.

” They came from China and we took them to China... Usually when you go to an- other country illegally, you are taken back to your last port of departure.

”Yesterday, another 37 Taiwan nationals were forced on to a Chinese plane, Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry said.”

The 15 locked up at the police station steadfastly refused to be deported (to China),” said Antonio C.S. Chen, the chief of Taiwan’s foreign ministry department in charge of West Asian and African Affairs.

” So police broke through the wall, threw tear gas and then about 10 police entered with assault rifles,” Chen told a news briefing in Taipei.

When asked about the use of force, Njoka said that Kenyan police had “an obligation to ensure if people are here illegally they are taken back to where they came from.”

China views Taiwan as a wayward province, to be brought under Beijing’s control by force if necessary. Defeated Nationalist forces fled to the island in 1949 after a civil war with the Communists now in control in Beijing.

Only 22 countries recognize Taiwan as the “Republic of China,” with most, including Kenya, having diplomatic relations with the “People’s Republic of China,” with its Communist Party leaders in Beijing.