NAIROBI, Oct 7: The American author of a best-selling, controversial book blasting White House hopeful Barack Obama on Tuesday faced deportation from Kenya after being detained by security officials, police said.

Jerome Corsi, who was scheduled to unveil “The Obama Nation” to the Kenyan public at a Nairobi hotel, was briefly detained in the capital Nairobi early Tuesday, officially for “visa-related issues.” Corsi “was detained and is currently being held at the immigration office,” a top police official said.

The author’s spokesman confirmed that they were being questioned.

“Before we launched the book, immigration officials came to us and said that they were investigating us on immigration issues. (Finally) they said that our visa and passport were in order, but they had lost the customs form,” said his spokesman Tim Bueler.

Bueler explained that they had been taken to the airport for investigation, but a Kenyan immigration official said the author was being deported.

“A decision has been reached to deport Corsi. He is being transported to the airport,” an immigration official said on condition of anonymity.

“There was a problem with his travel documents and his mission in the country. It is not clearly stated what he came to do in Kenya,” he added. Obama’s father, now deceased, was Kenyan and the US senator running for president enjoys wide support in East Africa.

In his book, Corsi also pillories Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, whom he accuses of supporting the agenda of radical Muslims.

In a press release distributed earlier this week, Corsi announced he would “expose deep secret ties between US Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama and a section of the Kenyan government leaders.” He was also to detail Kenyan leaders’ “connections to certain sectoral groups in Kenya and a subsequent plot to be executed in Kenya should Sen. Obama win the American presidency,” the release said.

The police officially denied Corsi’s detention was linked to the contents of his book.

“Just like anybody else, we are concerned with his immigration papers. We have nothing to do with the book or whoever it’s about. It’s about the law of Kenya,” the senior official said.

Corsi made his name by co-authoring “Unfit for Command,” which maligned 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s Vietnam War record and is believed to have contributed to his defeat by President George W. Bush.

Corsi’s book on Obama, subtitled “Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” was released on Aug 1.

The book’s publisher, Threshold Editions, said it examined “why the extreme leftism of an Obama presidency would leave the US weakened, diminished and divided, why Obama must be defeated — and how he can be.” Tuesday’s issue of the US edition of Reader’s Digest Magazine said Obama would win with a landslide if the entire planet was voting in the US elections, not just Americans.

Respondents voted “overwhelmingly” for Obama in every country polled except the United States, where Republican John McCain was slightly ahead in the race for the Nov 4 vote.

Barack Obama, who was born in the US, barely knew his Kenyan father who returned to his homeland when Barack was a young boy. But Obama was given a hero’s welcome during his last visit to the family village in western Kenya in 2006. His grandmother still lives there and is now a local celebrity.—AFP