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Fresh violence near the Kenyan coast has led to the deaths of at least 15 people, officials said on Tuesday, a day after Somali Shebab rebels killed almost 50 people in the same region. The al-Qaeda linked Harakat al-Shebab al-Mujahideen said that its fighters executed the attack on a Kenyan village, and its commando unit had been able to return to base after two nights of bloodshed.
“We carried out another attack last night. We killed 20 people, mainly police and Kenyan wildlife wardens. The commandos have been going to several places looking for military personnel”, Abdulaziz Abu Musab, Shebab’s military spokesman said.
“The commandos have fulfilled their duties and returned peacefully to their base”, he added. He, however, did not say if the insurgents were still in Kenya or had gone back to Somalia, some 100 kilometers to the north.
On Monday, the police confirmed that the gunmen who had attacked the village Poromoko, reportedly belonging to the same set of people who had killed around 50 in the town Mpeketoni, both in Lamu county, on Sunday. Zipporah Mboroki, spokeswoman for the Kenyan police, said that the attack happened at a time when top officials flew into the region to coordinate local security operations.
The assault on Mpeketoni, near popular tourist resort island of Lamu, late on Sunday was the most lethal attack in Kenya since a siege on Westgate shopping mall last September in capital city Nairobi, which saw 67 people die.
Witnesses say that the militants reached the predominantly Christian town late on Sunday night, and attacked hotels, homes and a police station. They reportedly executed non-Muslims and spared the lives of Muslim men, women and children. According to witnesses, they forced people out of their homes and shot them in the head one after the other.