Kenya mourns attack victims
Extremist group killed 148 people in siege at university
GARISSA, Kenya — The 20-year-old student called home from the university besieged by Islamic militants and frantically told her father, “There are gunshots everywhere! Tell Mum to pray for me — I don’t know if I will survive.”
The call by Elizabeth Namarome Musinai at dawn Thursday was one of several her family received as the attack and hostage drama unfolded at Garissa University College, where gunmen from the al-Shabab militant group killed 148 people.
Then, about 1 p.m., a man got on the line to demand that Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta be contacted within two minutes and told to remove troops from neighboring Somalia, where they are fighting al-Shabab extremists.
He phoned back promptly. When told the president had not been contacted, he said, “I am going to kill your daughter.” Three gunshots followed, and he hung up. When Elizabeth’s father, Fred Kaskon Musinai, called the man back, he said he was told: “She is now with her God.”
Musinai said he is still hanging on to hope that Elizabeth somehow survived, although she is not on the list of wounded, which now numbers 104. He has traveled from his home in Kitale to Nairobi, where the dead are being brought to a morgue for families to identify and claim.
Survivors and relatives gave other harrowing accounts of the siege by Islamic extremists as Kenya on Friday mourned the victims of the attack, the deadliest since the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi that killed more than 200 people.
At the Nairobi morgue, screaming and crying family members were assisted by Red Cross staffers, who tried to console them.
Archbishop John Njue, who conducted Good Friday services in the capital, cited the “murdered” students and said, “This is a tremendous challenge in our country.”
Pope Francis condemned the attack as an act of “senseless brutality” and called for those responsible to change their violent ways.
In a telegram of condolence, Francis also urged Kenyan authorities to work to bring an end to such attacks and “hasten the dawn of a new era of brotherhood, justice and peace.”
The gunmen singled out Christians at the university, killing them on the spot.
But Muslims also were among the dead, as were women, even though the attackers had said at one point that they, too, would be spared.
The masked attackers — strapped with explosives and armed with AK-47s — battled troops and police before the violence ended after about 13 hours.