Nairobi — A laptop seized from terror suspect Abdalla Fazul's wife may contain explosive information, the Nation can reveal.

Police are trying to crack the password to open the computer his wife, Halima Badroudine Fazul, was carrying when she was arrested about two weeks ago at Kiunga on the Kenya-Somalia border.

Investigators believe the computer contains clues about what the terror suspect planned to do next.

Was arrested

Other sources close to the interrogators said Mrs Fazul was also found with 1,600 euros (about Sh145,600) and US$5,000 (about Sh350,000) when she was arrested.

She told the police that the computer was a gift for her three children from the their father.

"We believe the computer was being taken to a third party who may have the password," our sources said yesterday.

Mr Fazul is on the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) list of the most wanted terrorists.

Sources said 30-year-old Mrs Fazul had barely spent 10 days with her husband in Mogadishu when chaos erupted forcing them to flee.

She had just arrived in Mogadishu from Pakistan where she was a student at a religious institution for women known as Mahdi.

Mrs Fazul was arrested together with her three children Afiya (11), Lukman (10) and Sumeiya (5). Mr Fazul is believed to be the leader of al Qaeda cells in East Africa and the mastermind of both Nairobi and Kikambala bombings.

Others in Mrs Fazul's group being interrogated in Nairobi are: Mr Salmin Mohammed Khamis, Mr Salim Awadh Salim and his wife Fatuma Ahmed Chande. Mr Khamis was in a group recently acquitted by a Nairobi court on suspicion they took part in the Nairobi and Kikambala bombings.

The wife of Mr Saleh Nabhany, another man on the FBI list, Ms Fatuma Ahmed Abdulkarim and her daughter Hafsa, Ms Halima Hashim, whose husband Abdulrahman Mohammed Hanif is suspected to have died in the recent bombing in Ras Kamboni, have also been facing interrogators. Mr Nabhany fled together with Mr Fazul when the group was confronted by Kenyan authorities at Kiunga.

Mr Fazul, Mr Issa Omar Issa, Mr Salmin Mohammed, another unidentified man and the 10 who were arrested, set off for Kiunga when Mogadishu fell to the Ethiopians.

Spent night

They spent a night at a forest in Kiunga and while Mr Fazul, Mr Nabhany, Mr Issa and the unidentified man disappeared, the police pounced on the remaining party that was under the watch of Mr Salmin.

While in Somalia Mr Fazul is said to have changed his name to Ahmed Hassan. He is also known by over a dozen other names, all fake to hide his identity.

It has also emerged that while in Somalia, Mr Fazul was the head of the Union of Islamic Courts intelligence.

Sources, however, say that due to the camouflage that he had undergone even the UIC leadership did not know that he was the terror suspect with a US$5 million bounty on his head.