28 ‘executed’ in Kenya bus ambush
GUNMEN seized a bus in northeastern Kenya near the Somali border early yesterday and executed 28 non-Muslim passengers. Al Shabaab Islamic extremists claimed responsibility for the attack.
Yesterday’s killings come after a week in which police raids on mosques in the port city of Mombasa increased tension in the troubled city.
The gunmen ambushed the bus a few kilometres after it left the town of Mandera, on Kenya’s border with Somalia.
Some 60 passengers were ordered off the bus, then separated into Muslims and nonMuslims.
The militants tried to drive away with the non-Muslims, but the vehicle got stuck.
Regional police chief Noah Mwavinda said “they executed their prisoners” before escaping back into Somalia.
This week, one person was shot dead and more than 350 arrested as Kenyan security forces raided mosques in Mombasa in search of arms and al-Shabaab sympathisers.
Four people were stabbed to death in apparent revenge attacks on Monday, with gangs taking to the streets, beating some and knifing others, after the raids had raised tension in a city hit by a string of bombings and shootings.
Kenya has suffered a series of attacks since invading Somalia in 2011 and later joining an African Union force to fight the Islamists.
Al-Shabaab was responsible for the siege of Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall in September last year.
UN investigators have warned that air and drone strikes on the militia in Somalia have done little to damage it in the long term.
Pressure on the fighters had forced them to “become more operationally audacious by placing greater emphasis on exporting its violence beyond the borders of Somalia”, they said. — WOUNDS OF WAR: Women who were operated on at a government mass sterilisation camp pose at a hospital in the eastern Indian state of Chhattisgarh