Pilot tells BBC about secret mission to bring late president’s remains home

NAIROBI — Thirty-one years ago this week, a Nigerian diplomat walked into a modest office at Wilson Airport and asked two Kenyan pilots to do something almost no one could know about. The mission: fly the body of Somalia’s ousted ruler, Mohamed Siad Barre, from Lagos to his hometown of Garbaharey for a swift Islamic burial — quietly, safely and without alerting authorities across half a continent.

For the first time, one of those pilots, Hussein Mohamed Anshuur — a former Kenya Air Force captain and co-founder of Bluebird Aviation — is speaking publicly about the clandestine operation that threaded through fragile regional politics, workarounds in air traffic control and the ethics of honoring a family’s request against the backdrop of a nation’s trauma.

“We knew immediately this wasn’t a normal charter,” Anshuur told the BBC, recalling the diplomat’s unvarnished ask and the insistence that the Kenyan government not be informed. The year was 1995; Barre, who seized power in a 1969 coup and was toppled by militia forces in 1991, had died in exile in Nigeria at age 80 after a diabetes-related illness.

Accepting the charter meant stepping into a minefield. Barre had initially fled to Kenya after his fall, only for President Daniel arap Moi’s government to face intense pressure at home for hosting him. Nigeria’s then-military ruler, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, granted him political asylum in Lagos. Returning Barre’s body to Somalia, just four years removed from his ouster, carried the hint of symbolism and the risk of diplomatic blowback.

“If the Kenyan authorities found out, it could have caused serious problems,” Anshuur said. He and his business partner, pilot Mohamed Adan, spent a day weighing the request — the money was “lucrative,” he said, without giving figures — and drafting conditions. They demanded formal guarantees from Nigeria: if the mission touched off political trouble, Abuja would take responsibility. They also insisted two Nigerian embassy officials be on board.

Nigeria agreed. So did the pilots.

Shortly after 3 a.m. on Jan. 11, 1995, their Beechcraft King Air B200 lifted off from Wilson Airport for Lagos, a 4,300-kilometer run with fuel stops in Yaoundé and Entebbe. They landed around 1 p.m., where Barre’s family was waiting. Rested and refueled, the crew prepared for the final leg: a return trip, with a wooden casket in the cabin and a destination they would not declare to most of the airports along their path.

“At no point did we tell airport authorities in Cameroon, Uganda or Kenya that we were carrying a body,” Anshuur said. “That was deliberate.”

On Jan. 12, the casket was loaded. The two Nigerian officials took their seats alongside six family members, including Barre’s son, Ayaanle Mohamed Siad Barre. The aircraft retraced its route to Yaoundé and then Entebbe, where the crew filed onward to Kisumu in western Kenya. Nearing Kisumu, they veered off, slipping across the border and landing on the short, rugged runway at Garbaharey.

From the family’s side, the resolve was shaped by faith, urgency and logistics. Islamic tradition calls for burial as soon as possible after death, Ayaanle said, and waiting for full paperwork would have delayed the rites. “Time was against us,” he told the BBC. Nigerian officials, he added, also believed a military aircraft would be ill-suited for Garbaharey’s airstrip. “That’s why Bluebird Aviation was contacted.”

The landing delivered more than a body; it carried closure to a hometown that had seen Barre’s final chapters only from a distance. Anshuur and his co-pilot — who had previously flown food and medicine to Burdubo, near Garbaharey, when Barre’s family fled Mogadishu — watched the burial before starting the most nerve-jangling segment of the mission: the flight home to Nairobi.

“You think: ‘This is where we could be stopped,’” Anshuur said of the return to Wilson Airport. To mask the aircraft’s true route, they told air traffic control they were arriving from Mandera in northeastern Kenya — a domestic hop unlikely to draw inspection. “No one asked questions,” he said. Only then did the crew exhale.

For those who had lived under Barre, the secretness underscored the complexity of his legacy. Admirers cast him as a pan-Africanist who backed liberation movements, including the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Detractors saw an autocrat whose rule hardened into repression. By the time he was forced out in January 1991, Somalia was fracturing, its institutions corroded and militias ascendant.

In the quiet cockpit of a twin-turboprop, that argument was irrelevant. What mattered was a singular task. “It wasn’t an easy choice,” Anshuur said of accepting the charter. “But we felt the responsibility to execute the trip.” The secrecy that shielded the mission was a function of the era’s patchwork oversight: large gaps in African air traffic radar and limited cross-border coordination left room for improvisation.

Today, Anshuur said, such a mission would be unrealistic. “I am 65 years old now and no, I would not carry out a similar mission today because aviation technology has improved so much that there is now sufficient air traffic radar coverage within the African continent,” he said. “It is virtually impossible to exploit the gaps in air traffic control that existed way back in 1995.”

The episode also marked a formative moment for Bluebird Aviation, which the two pilots had launched only a few years earlier and which has become one of Kenya’s largest private airlines. It was a test of discretion, a study in risk and a story they kept to themselves for decades.

“Only afterwards did it really sink in what we had done,” Anshuur said. The mission ended with the quietest measure of success: no headlines, no arrests, no diplomatic crisis — just a plane on the tarmac at Wilson, a cleared taxiway and a long-held silence about the flight that left Nairobi in the dead of night to take a former strongman home.

By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.