Gunmen from the Islamist militant group al Shabaab
stormed a university in Kenya and killed at least 147 people
on Thursday, in the worst attack on Kenyan soil since the
U.S. embassy was bombed in 1998.
The siege ended nearly 15 hours after the Somali group's
gunmen shot their way into the Garissa University College
campus in a pre-dawn attack, sparing Muslim students and
taking many Christians hostage.
A security operation is over and 147 people have been killed
in an attack Thursday by Al Qaeda-linked terror group Al-
Shabaab on a Kenyan college, officials said.
The officials said four attackers were killed during the
operation.
The siege on Garissa University also left dozens more
injured and hundreds of students unaccounted for.
Hours after the assault began, Kenyan security forces
cornered the gunmen in a dormitory at the school, and
President Uhuru Kenyatta said in a speech to the nation
that the attackers were holding hostages.
"There are many dead bodies of Christians inside the
building," Al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Abdiasis Abu
Musab told Sky News. "We are also holding many
Christians alive. Fighting still goes on inside the college."
Collins Wetangula, the vice chairman of the student union,
said when the gunmen arrived at his dormitory he could
hear them opening doors and asking if the people who had
hidden inside whether they were Muslims or Christians.
"If you were a Christian you were shot on the spot," he said.
"With each blast of the gun I thought I was going to die."
A spokesman for the terror group told the BBC that it
attacked the school because “it’s on Muslim land colonized
by non-Muslims.” The spokesman also said the gunmen
had separated non-Muslims from Muslims and had freed 15
of the latter group.
The interior ministry said around 500 of 815 students have
been accounted for, but hundreds remain missing. The
students at Garissa are predominantly non-Muslim, a
source told Fox News.
Police identified a possible mastermind of the attack as
Mohammed Mohamud, who is alleged to lead Al-Shabaab's
cross-border raids into Kenya, and they posted a $220,000
bounty for him. Also known by the names Dulyadin and
Gamadhere, he was a teacher at an Islamic religious school,
or madrassa, and claimed responsibility for a bus attack in
Makka, Kenya, in November that killed 28 people.
The attack occurred at 5:30 a.m. local time (10:30 p.m.
Wednesday E.T.) during morning prayers at the university
mosque, according to Augustine Algana, a student at the
school who survived the attack and spoke to the Associated
Press.
Algana said gunfire rang throughout campus while students
were still sleeping.
Terrified students sprinted out of buildings as police
officers arrived on the scene. The gunmen had opened fire
at guards triggering a “fierce shootout” with police guarding
student dorms, Kenya’s National Police said in a statement.
Wetangula said he was preparing to take a shower when he
heard gunshots coming from Tana dorm, which hosts both
men and women, 150 yards away.
He said that when he heard the gunshots he locked himself
and three roommates in their room.
"All I could hear were footsteps and gunshots nobody was
screaming because they thought this would lead the
gunmen to know where they are," he said. "The gunmen
were saying sisi ni Al-Shabaab (Swahili for we are al-
Shabaab)," Wetangula said.
"The next thing, we saw people in military uniform through
the window of the back of our rooms who identified
themselves as the Kenyan military," Wetangula said. The
soldiers took him and around 20 others to safety.
"We started running and bullets were whizzing past our
heads and the soldiers told us to dive," Wetangula said. He
said the soldier told the students later that Al-Shabaab
snipers were perched on a three story dormitory called the
Elgon and were trying to shoot them.
The Kenya Red Cross said on Twitter that 65 injured people
were taken to a hospital and four of them were in critical
condition. Kenya’s National Disaster Operations center said
most had gunshot wounds. Authorities said some of the
more seriously wounded were being flown to Kenya’s
capital, Nairobi.
Kenya's northern and eastern regions, which border
Somalia, have been plagued by attacks blamed on Al-
Shabaab, an Islamist group from Somalia.
The militant group has vowed retribution on Kenya for
sending troops into Somalia to fight the militants. Kenya
sent its military there in 2011 to fight al-Shabaab following
cross-border attacks.
Last month, Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for attacks
in the county of Mandera on the Somali border in which
twelve people died. Four of them died in an attack on the
convoy of Mandera County Governor Ali Roba.
Al-Shabaab carried out large-scale attacks in Mandera last
year. The militants hijacked a bus and singled out 28 non-
Muslims forcing them to lie on the ground before shooting
them dead. Ten days later, 36 non-Muslim quarry workers
were killed by the extremists.
Police statistics show that 312 people have been killed in Al-
Shabaab attacks in Kenya from 2012 to 2014. Thirty-eight
people were killed and 149 wounded in Garissa in the same
period, according to police statistics.
Kenyatta has been under pressure to deal with insecurity
caused by a string of attacks by Al-Shabaab.
In his speech to the country, he said he had directed the
police chief to fast-track the training of 10,000 police
recruits because Kenya has "suffered unnecessarily due to
shortage of security personnel."
Al Shabaab, who carried out the deadly attack on the
Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi in 2013, claimed
responsibility for the raid on the campus in Garissa, a town
200 km (120 miles) from the Somali border. The group has
links to al Qaeda and a record of raids on Kenyan soil in
retaliation for Nairobi sending troops to fight it in its home
state of Somalia.
(Reuters/Al Shabab) CLICK HERE TO READ FULL AND TOUCHING NIGERIAN CELEBRITIES BIOGRAPHY AND SCANDALS
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