The Muslim cleric deported from Kenya at the end of the week has arrived in his homeland, Jamaica, where he was received by the country’s police and held for questioning.

Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal stepped on Jamaican soil on Friday evening and a newspaper-Jamaican Gleaner- ran a photo of him at the Norman Manley International Airport.

He was dressed in jeans trousers and a checked shirt and carried two suitcases.

He is said to have told reporters at the airport he was too tired to talk after flying for two days and could not disclose the route the chartered Gulfstream jet took to get to the island nation.

The 46-year-old cleric is however said to have told the journalists that the flight was paid for by a South African company and the paper quoted “informed sources” saying it made stops to refuel in Burkina Faso, the Republic of Cape Verde and Antigua.

The man now referred to as the ‘hate cleric’ for his infamy for preaching hatred was also questioned by that country’s Special Branch investigators for nearly an hour before he was whisked away in a minibus.

The Jamaican Gleaner also quoted sources who said the trip had cost $500,000 (Sh37.5 million). Immigration minister Otieno Kajwang’ had said Kenya could not afford the Sh40 million needed to ferry the cleric home.

Government spokesman Dr Alfred Mutua confirmed that the cleric arrived in Jamaica at about 1 a.m. Kenyan time, nearly four hours after the time the government there was said to have been expecting him.

Lawyer and human rights activist Harun Ndubi told the Nation Sheikh Al-Faisal “retains the right to sue the Kenyan government for the violation of his fundamental rights.”

He accused the authorities of recklessness by allowing the cleric into Kenya in the first place and later holding him incommunicado after the blunder was discovered.

“Had they denied him entry in the first place, nobody would have paid a shilling to take him to his country of origin. With the tourist visa he had, there is a legal way of dealing with him and this should have been followed,” said Mr Ndubi.

The necessity of a direct trip on a chartered plane arose after several attempts to deport him failed due to the refusal by countries to allow him to fly over their air-space or provide him with a transit visa.

Sheikh al-Faisal was deported from the United Kingdom in May 2007 after serving a seven-year stint in prison for soliciting murder and stirring up racial hatred.

He was arrested on New Year’s Eve in Mombasa as he left a mosque and initially accused of going against the conditions of the two-months visa he had been granted on entry by preaching.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Saturday

International rescuers on Saturday pulled a 24-year-old Haitian man alive from the rubble of a collapsed hotel in the capital Port-au-Prince, 11 days after the earthquake that devastated the city.

He was the latest of more than 130 people who have been pulled out still living from under wrecked buildings by rescue teams from around the world since the January 12 quake.

After a four-hour rescue operation, the Haitian man was carefully extracted from the rubble of the Hotel Napoli Inn in downtown Rue du Centre. Rescuers said he appeared to be able to move his limbs but was thirsty.

To reach the survivor, two members of French and Greek search-and-rescue teams had crawled into the tangled mass of concrete rubble, wooden beams and corrugated iron that was all that was left of the hotel in downtown Rue du Centre.

They sawed away material to help the trapped man out.“He was holding the light to help us. He just said ‘Thank You’ when we pulled him out,” Mr Carmen Michalska, a rescuer with the Greek team, told Reuters.

Journalists and onlookers cheered and clapped as the man was carried to an ambulance on a stretcher. “We have an indication there are more people in there. We are going to go back in,” Mr Michalska said. French, Greek and US rescuers had earlier located the man, who had been heard tapping and talking under the rubble.

The United Nations said on Saturday the government had declared the post-quake search and rescue phase over, but some operations were still continuing.

Meanwhile, international aid workers looked to speed up relief efforts in Haiti today after criticism that food, water and medicine was not getting to victims 12 days after a devastating earthquake.

Survivors camped out in filthy conditions in about 300 makeshift camps across Haiti’s shattered capital, Port-au-Prince. People complained they were not getting enough aid, despite a huge US-led international relief campaign.

Responding to the criticisms, US Agency for International Development chief Rajiv Shah said his organisation was doing all it could under difficult circumstances.

“The scale of the destruction and the human consequence … is just unparalleled. … We’re never going to meet the need as quickly as we’d like,” Mr Shah told Reuters. “We’re going to be here providing the support for a long time.”

The January 12, magnitude-7 quake killed up to 200,000 people, Haitian authorities said, and left up to three million people hurt or homeless and clamouring for medical assistance, food and water in nightmarish conditions in the hemisphere’s poorest country.

At a camp in Port-au-Prince on Saturday, people desperate for food swarmed bags of rice being off-loaded from a dump truck, even with US and UN troops and Haitian police standing guard.