At least six people have been killed in an attack on a residential building in northeast Kenya by suspected fighters from the Somalia-based group al-Shabab, authorities have said.
Security official Mohamud Ali Saleh said on Thursday the assailants used explosives in order to infilitrate the gated building in Mandera county, situated less than a kilometre away from the Somalia border town of Beled Hawa.
“We highly suspect the attackers are members of the Shabaab insurgent group, who have sneaked across the porous border,” he said.
“These criminal gangs are desperate to hurt innocent Kenyans since they were defeated badly and routed out of all their hideouts in the neighbouring country.”
The Mandera region on the Somali border has often been targeted by al-Shabab, which says it will continue a campaign of violence in Kenya until the government there withdraws its troops from Somalia where they are part of an African Union force.
“We have suffered another sad attack,” t he governor of Mandera county, Ali Roba, wrote on Twitter.
“If not for the quick response by our security forces, we would be talking of many more casualties now,” he told Reuters. “From the nature and style of the attack, it will obviously be al-Shabab.”
Police chief Joseph Boinnet told the AFP news agency that there were 33 people inside the compound when the attack took place in the early hours of the morning.
There was no immediate comment from al-Shabab.
Repeated attacks in Kenya by al-Shabab have killed hundreds of people in the past three years or so and hurt the country’s vital tourism industry.
The assaults have often been in the northeast, near the long and porous border with Somalia, but the group has also struck coastal areas popular with tourists and the capital Nairobi, where al-Shabab gunman attacked the Westgate shopping centre in 2013.(Al Jazeera)
Link: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/al-shabab-blamed-attack-northeast-kenya-161006052130719.html
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