According to the official Zanzibari history, the revolution was planned and headed by the ASP leader Abeid Amani Karume. However, at the time Karume was on the African mainland as was the leader of the banned Umma Party, Abdulrahman Muhammad Babu. The ASP branch secretary for Pemba, Ugandan-born ex-policeman John Okello, had sent Karume to the mainland to ensure his safety. Okello had arrived in Zanzibar from Kenya in 1959, claiming to have been a field marshal for the Kenyan rebels during the Mau Mau uprising, although he actually had no military experience. He maintained that he heard a voice commanding him, as a Christian, to free the Zanzibari people from the Muslim Arabs, though Zanzibaris themselves were predominantly Muslim and it was Okello who led the revolutionaries—mainly unemployed members of the Afro-Shirazi Youth League—on 12 January. One commentator has further speculated that it was probably Okello, with the Youth League, who planned the revolution. There appears to have been three different plots to overthrow the government, led by Karume, Babu and Okello, but it was Okello's plan which was furthest advanced and it was he who struck the blow that brought down the Sultan's regime. Okello was not widely known in Zanzibar, and the government was more concerned with monitoring the ASP and Umma rather than a little-known and barely literate house painter and minor union official. Okello was a complete mystery to the world at the time of the revolution, and MI5 reported to Whitehall that he was an ex-policeman who fought with the Mau Mau in Kenya and had been trained in Cuba in the art of revolutionary violence. Okello himself at a press conference several days later angrily denied having ever been to Cuba or China, stating that he was a Christian whose motto was "Everything can be learned from the Bible".