From Being a Weakling Bullied in School to Being a Jihadist, What Changed Salim Ali Gichunge?

Growing up, i believe we all had our weaknesses that our mates used to try and bring us down with either by making fun about us or teasing us.

Some of us were stammerers, others used to urinate on their beddings while some could just not defend themselves from any onslaught by their mates.

Such was the case of Salim Ali Gichunge, one of the terrorists at Dusit D2 Hotel that rained terror and anguish on innocent Kenyans.

Salim went to school just like most of us do and was infact a great performer.

Gichunge, known in Isiolo as Ali, schooled at Hekima Primary from nursery to Standard Six.

He then moved to Isiolo Barracks for the remainder of his primary school education.

He sat his Kenya Certificate of Primary Education examination in 2007 and scored 335 marks out of a possible 500.

His sister, Ms Shariff, said Gichunge left their Isiolo home in 2015 after completing his secondary school education at Thuura Boys in Meru in 2011 — after two short stints at Kibirichia Boys and Muthambi Boys. He attained a C+ grade.

He appears to have been a supple boy when growing up, as he left Kibirichia because he claimed he could not bear the cold, and Muthambi because he said he had been bullied by older boys.

A minor accident in Form One put an end to his dream of becoming a rugby player, and so he shifted his dream to information technology.

After high school, Gichunge studied IT within the township, after which he was hired by a local hotel to run its cybercafé.

That exposed him to the endless possibilities of the Internet, and soon he told his sister that he wanted to enrol for an online course on religious studies.

“After a few months, he called me to say he was heading to Meru for a job interview,” Ms Shariff said.

A few hours after Gichunge left Isiolo, officers from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations raided the cybercafé on terror-related suspicions and carted away all the computers.

In early 2016, Gichunge told his family that he had moved to Mombasa to work at a construction site on the invitation of a friend.

But a month later, the friend informed the family that he had lost contact with their son.

The family was to later hear about him in the media after a picture of him went viral for his involvement in the Dusit D2 attack.

He is believed to have died in the Tuesday attack after commandos stormed the 14 Riverside Drive complex in the afternoon to end an attack that claimed 21 lives.

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