You’re going to Australia

When Kenyan detective, Issa Mohamud, posed as a buyer in an illegal-arms deal, he had to kill or be killed.

He had fronted up for the transaction with a team of back-up officers, which lay in wait in the darkness of late evening. Two gun-dealers revealed the several AK-47 rifles they had brought for sale.

They then waited expectantly for Mohamud – disguised as an unkempt criminal – to hand over some cash. But he had no intention to make any payment. Instead, he shouted: “I’m a police officer! You are under arrest! Don’t move!”

In a defiant act that would bring about their demise, the dealers made a desperate attempt to shoot it out. One dived toward the back of the station wagon in which the pair had brought the guns. Mohamud opened fire. He killed one dealer and injured the other.

But concealed in bushes, as the transaction had taken place, was one of the dealers’ accomplices. In an instant, gunfire erupted between him and the back-up team. Mohamud, accompanied by his informer, found himself caught between flying bullets.

“I made sure that this (first) guy was dead, and that the other one was down,” he says. “We tried to handcuff him while he was still lying on the arms. We had a lot of gunshots, even in the vehicle, but we were lucky...

“That operation I did in 1998, and it was the most dangerous I ever did. (It ran) from May up to November.”

The scourge of instability in nations that surround Kenya means that criminals commonly smuggle illegal arms into Mohamud’s country.

In a 1994 shootout, Mohamud and three colleagues happened upon a gang of fleeing robbers, which had just held up a shop. The incident played out with a high-speed chase, through which the offenders somehow switched cars.

In a rare moment of ascendency, they managed to position themselves behind the police, and become the pursuers. “Now,” says Mohamud, “they started firing. I was sitting in the front. One of the officers in the back was hit in the side.

“We got outside and had to start firing at them. We managed to kill three or four of them. It was all so dangerous. But, sometimes, police work is very, very dangerous.”

Now a chief inspector with Kenya’s Revenue Protection Services, Mohamud, 34, is in Adelaide to take part in a 10-week detective training course. The first news of his trip Downunder, however, came with little ado. His boss, a deputy commissioner in command of Kenya’s CID, simply announced: “You’re going to Australia.”

Mohamud, a husband and father of three, had worked outside his country before. One of his stints was as a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia for 12 months. But the experienced young policeman knew nothing of Australia.

To bring himself up to speed, he explored the Internet and secured a book, Beautiful Australia, from the Australian High Commission in Kenya. The land Downunder struck him as “a big continent with not much population”. But the prospect of joining a detective course on “the other side of the world” kept him excited.

Since he arrived in June, he has only encountered two problems: Adelaide’s cold winter, and the Aussie accent.

“I never thought it was going to be so cold,” he says. “I thought maybe there would be some humidity and higher temperatures, and that I would be in t-shirts, as in my country.”

As for the lingo, Mohamud finds the occasional difficulty in his course lectures. “When I have a problem with the accent,” he says, “I just ask one of my colleagues, and he tells me what the instructor has said.

“I’ve picked up some greetings, like: ‘G’day, mate’, and they say ‘crikey’ when they are surprised by something. I had never heard that.”

A visit to a wildlife sanctuary and plenty of weekend barbecues with new police friends have given Mohamud a strong sense of Aussie culture. And he has found Australian living standards higher than those in his own country of 31 million.

The son of a policeman, Mohamud began his career at officer level in 1989. After six months’ training, he graduated as a cadet inspector. He won confirmation as an inspector two years later.

In late 1992, he underwent CID training and began work as a detective with a Nairobi special unit, which targeted smuggling, animal-poaching and highway robbery. In his current role – a secondment with the Revenue Protection Services – Mohamud investigates customs and excise offences, as well as tax evasion.

“It is fantastic,” he says, “and involves a lot of travelling – all around the country. I joined in May, and we have about 20 of us in the country. Our headquarters is based in Nairobi.”

During his visit to Adelaide, Mohamud has scored some time on the streets with his South Australian counterparts. On an afternoon shift at Elizabeth, he took part in the arrest of a drink-driver, on whom police found thousands in cash. A later search of his home revealed cannabis plants growing under lights.

Also at Elizabeth, Mohamud helped officers arrest a young offender who had raped a 77-year-old woman. And, at Port Adelaide, he worked with officers who arrested an illegal user, who fled from his commandeered car.

“I was with them when they were doing the interview,” he says, “and it was good. They were doing it according to procedure, doing the right thing.”

From his detective training course, which ends this month, Mohamud plans to take home what he says are valuable pointers he learned on interviewing techniques.

“They have what they call the cognitive interview when they talk to a suspect,” he says. “It does not suggest anything leading and observes rules of human rights, so it’s very important.

“We don’t have such a model, and it is something that I need to take back home and teach people there.”