Law graduate fingered in massacre
NAIROBI – Kenyan authorities have named one of the gunmen who killed 148 people in a university massacre as an ethnic Somali Kenyan and law graduate, highlighting the al-Qaeda-linked alShebaab’s ability to recruit within the country.
Interior ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said high-flying Abdirahim Abdullahi was “a university of Nairobi law graduate and described by a person who knows him well as a brilliant upcoming lawyer ”.
The spokesman said Abdullahi ’ s father, a local official in the northeastern county of Mandera, had “reported to the authorities that his son had gone missing and suspected the boy had gone to Somalia ”.
Kenya entered the second of three days of national mourning yesterday for those killed in last week ’ s massacre, the vast majority of whom were students.
Somalia ’ s al-Shebaab mil- itants attacked the university in the northeastern town of Garissa at dawn on Thursday, lining up non-Muslim students for execution in what President Uhuru Kenyatta described as a “barbaric medieval slaughter ”.
Although Kenyatta has vowed to retaliate “in the severest way possible ”, there have also been calls for national unity. He said people ’“s justified anger ” should not lead to “the victimisation of anyone ”– a clear reference to Kenya ’ s large Muslim and Somali minorities in a country where 80% of the population is Christian.
The massacre, Kenya ’ s deadliest attack since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, claimed the lives of 142 students, three police officers and three soldiers. Hours after al-Shebaab ’ s warning, police in Garissa paraded four corpses of the gunmen piled on top of each other face down in the back of a pick- up truck. Five men have also been arrested in connection with the attack, including three “coordinators ” captured as they fled towards Somalia, and two others in the university.
The two arrested on campus included a security guard and a Tanzanian found “hiding in the ceiling ” and holding grenades, the interior ministry said.
A R26-million bounty has also been offered for alleged al-Shebaab commander Mohamed Mohamud, a former Kenyan teacher said to be the mastermind behind the attack. Al-Shebaab fighters also carried out the Westgate shopping mall attack in Nairobi in September 2013 which left at least 67 people dead.
Investigators continued to scour the site, where one student survivor emerged unharmed from a wardrobe on Saturday where she had hidden for over two days.