Somali Militants Carry Out Deadly Attack in Northeast Kenya

Isma’il Kushkush, New York Times

7 July 2015

NAIROBI, Kenya — Shabab militants killed 14 people and wounded 11 in the northeastern Kenyan town of Mandera on Tuesday, a government official said, the latest attack in the region by the Somali Islamist group.

The grenade attack took place around 2 a.m. at a compound near a livestock market, according to officials, and most of the victims were miners from other parts of Kenya.

“I can confirm an Al Shabaab attack in Mandera early this morning,” the police inspector general, Joseph Boinnet, said on Twitter. “Regrettably 14 persons dead and 11 injured.”

A spokesman for the Shabab confirmed that the organization was responsible. “We are behind the Mandera attack. We killed over 10 Kenyan Christians,” Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, a spokesman for the group’s military operations, told Reuters. “This is part of our ongoing operations against Kenya.”

The Kenyan Red Cross, which sent a team of doctors and paramedics from the capital, Nairobi, said on Twitter that it had airlifted eight patients to the Kenyatta National Hospital there.

Mandera is in the northeastern corner of Kenya, along the borders with Somalia and Ethiopia.

Last year, 28 teachers were killed as they were traveling in the region for the end-of-year holidays. Not long after that episode, dozens of miners were shot and killed after militants separated Muslims from non-Muslims.

The deadliest attack attributed to the Shabab in Kenya took place in April, when 147 students and university staff members were killed at a university in Garissa. One of the militants in that assault came from Mandera, which is about 440 miles northeast of Garissa.

Kenyan officials said this year that they were constructing a security barrier that would stretch for miles along the border with Somalia, in an effort to deter attacks by the Shabab.

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