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 Strapped with explosives, masked al Shabaab gunmen stormed the
Garissa University College campus, some 200 km (120 miles) from the
Somali border, in a pre-dawn rampage on Thursday.
Tossing grenades and spraying bullets at cowering students, the
attackers initially killed indiscriminately. But they later freed
some Muslims and instead targeted Christian students during a siege
that lasted about 15 hours.
Anger over the massacre was compounded by the fact there were
warnings last week that an attack on a university was imminent.
Local residents accused the authorities of doing little to boost
security in this little developed region.
"It's because of laxity by the government that these things are
happening. For something like this to happen when there are those
rumors is unacceptable," said Mohamed Salat, 47, a Somali Kenyan
businessman.
Officials said almost 150 people died, with at least 79 wounded,
many critically. But with an uncertain number of students and staff
still missing, the casualties may yet mount.
"Yes, there is a likelihood of numbers going up," said one
government source dealing with the Garissa attack.
Kenya's biggest-selling Daily Nation newspaper, citing sources, said
the death toll would be significantly higher.
Outside the university gates, a throng of veiled women clang to the
hope that missing people would still turn up alive.
"We are here waiting for news if we can find him, dead or alive,"
said Barey Bare, 36, referring to her cousin who worked as a clerk
at the university and has been missing since Thursday.
The violence will heap further pressure on President Uhuru Kenyatta,
who has struggled to stop frequent militant gun and grenade attacks
that have dented Kenya's image abroad and brought the country's
vital tourism industry to its knees.
More than 400 people have been killed by the al Qaeda-allied al
Shabaab in the east African nation since Kenyatta took office in
April 2013, including some 67 people who died in a blitz on a
shopping mall in the capital Nairobi in September of that year.
Al Qaeda itself killed some 207 people when it blew up the U.S.
embassy in Nairobi in 1998.
Al Shabaab says its recent wave of attacks are retribution for Kenya
sending troops into Somalia to fight the group.
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"MOST WANTED" BOUNTY
Within hours of the attack, Kenya put up a 20 million shillings
($215,000) reward for the arrest of Mohamed Mohamud, a former
Garissa teacher labeled "Most Wanted" in a government poster and
linked by Kenyan media to two separate al Shabaab attacks in the
neighboring Mandera region last year.
The government also slapped a dusk to dawn (6.30am-6.30pm) curfew on
Garissa, Mandera and two other crime-ridden regions near the porous
700-km border with Somalia.
However, diplomats and analysts say the move effectively concedes
the government is not in control of these areas, which are widely
seen to be Kenya's soft underbelly.
As such, al Shabaab is likely to continue its strategy of attacking
"low risk and high reward" soft targets in marginalized parts of the
country, according to Ahmed Salim, a senior associate at Teneo
Intelligence.
Analysts and diplomats say Kenya's security services remain
disjointed and questions have been raised by Kenyan media about how
four gunmen were able to hold off hundreds of security personnel,
including soldiers and elite police units.
One Western diplomat said Kenya, a staunch Western ally in the fight
against radical Islam, continues to receive help from Western
intelligence agencies but struggles to act on it.
"The fundamental challenge for them is being able to deal with that
kind of information, and their capacity and capability of digesting
it," said the diplomat.
(Additional reporting by Drazen Jorgic and Humphrey Malalo; Writing
by Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Crispian Balmer)
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