Tuesday June 27, 2023
Mogadishu (HOL) - Two years after the abduction and unresolved murder of Ikran Tahlil, a National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) agent, her family remains grief-stricken and yearns for closure. Qali Guhad, Tahlil's outspoken mother, expressed her frustration in an interview on Sunday, stating that the Somali government has failed to bring justice for her daughter.
Guhad expressed her disappointment with
senior politicians who promised to pursue justice for her family during their campaigns, only to remain silent once in office. She challenged the Somali government not to abandon her daughter's case, calling on various influential figures, including Somalia's intelligence chief Mahad Salad, federal Minister of Petroleum, Abdirizak Omar and the Minister of Interior, Ahmed Moalim Fiqi, to bring her justice.
Ikran Tahlil Farah was employed by the Somali National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) in 2017, working in various roles, including the director of the Human Rights Compliance Division, the Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Mogadishu, and most recently, the head of the cybersecurity department.
On June 26, 2021, Ikran was mysteriously abducted near her home in the Abdulaziz district of Mogadishu, near the NISA headquarters. CCTV footage, which NISA allegedly claimed to be unavailable due to a malfunctioning video camera, shows her being taken away in a NISA Toyota SUV. The footage would suggest that Ikran was familiar with the driver, sparking a wave of speculation
regarding NISA's involvement in her disappearance.
The mystery deepened when NISA released a statement on September 2, 2021, claiming that Ikran had been
handed over to the terrorist organization Al Shabaab, who they claimed was responsible for her murder. Al Shabaab promptly refuted this allegation, further
muddying the waters surrounding her disappearance and purported death. The incident led to a political fallout between Prime Minister Mohammed Hussein Roble and President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed over the constitutionality of suspending the Director General of NISA, Fahad Yasin, who failed to submit a report on Ikran's death.
Speculations are rife regarding
the reasons behind Ikran's abduction and alleged murder. Former NISA Director-General Abdullahi Ali Sanbalolshe, who originally hired Ikran in 2017, suggested that she may have been targeted due to her possession of sensitive information about the secret deployment of Somali army recruits to Eritrea.