Garissa (Kenya): At least 148 students were massacred when Somalia's al-Shabaab Islamist group attacked a Kenyan university last week, the interior minister said, the deadliest attack in the country since US embassy bombings in 1998.
Masked gunmen stormed the university in the northeastern town of Garissa as students were sleeping, hurling grenades and shooting dead others, before setting Muslims free and holding Christians and others hostage. At least 79 people were wounded in the assault, which lasted for some 13 hours.
Finally, the four gunmen were killed when Kenyan troops launched an assault on the student dormitory where the gunmen were holed. “Unfortunately, we lost... a number of lives... it is in the region of 148 students, and 79 have been injured, nine of them critically,” Kenya's interior minster Joseph Nkaiserry told reporters.
Two al Shabaab camps in Somalia destroyed
The Kenyan air force has, meanwhile, destroyed two al Shabaab camps in Somalia in the first major military response since the Islamist group massacred students at a Kenyan university last week. Al Shabaab denied the camps were hit, saying the air force bombs fell on farmland.
Jets pounded the camps in the Gedo region on the other side of the frontier on Sunday, Kenya defence forces spokesman David Obonyo said. The mission was part of efforts to stop fighters from those camps carrying out cross-border raids into Kenya.
“Our aerial images show that the camps were completely destroyed,” he said, though cloud cover made it difficult to estimate the death toll. Al Shabaab has killed more than 400 people on Kenyan soil in the last two years, including 67 during a siege at Nairobi’s Westgate mall in 2013, piling political pressure on President Uhuru Kenyatta that intensified with last week’s killings.
Kenya has struggled to stop the flow of militants and weapons across its porous 700-km border with Somalia, and the violence has also damaged the economy by scaring away tourists and investors.
