At least nine people were shot and hacked to death in Kenya´s coastal Lamu County early Saturday, in the latest attack by militants in the region.
Police sources said Shabaab militants were believed to be behind the killings which took place in the villages of Jima and Pandaguo near the Somali border, an area that has seen a wave of recent attacks, mostly targeting the security forces.
All the victims were civilians and some were beheaded, according to police.
Another senior officer in Lamu said that a search was underway for any other bodies but that progress was hampered by fears of improvised explosive devices that might have been planted in the area. The officer said the number of attackers was not yet known.
Kenyan forces are pursuing the perpetrators who fled. “A security operation is still underway to try and get the attackers,” said James Ole Serian, who is in charge of a military operation in the nearby Boni Forest.
Earlier in the week, three police officers were killed in an attack on a police post in Lamu, also attributed to the Qaeda-aligned Shabaab.
The Shabaab is fighting to overthrow the internationally backed government in Mogadishu but also carries out regular attacks in neighbouring Kenya, which has troops in Somalia as part of an African Union force.
In its bloodiest single attack on Kenya so far, Shabaab gunmen raided a university in Garissa in April 2015 killing 148 people, most of them students, while in 2013 the group killed at least 67 people in an assault on a shopping mall in Nairobi.
In a televised address on Saturday morning — following the death in hospital of Kenya´s Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery — President Uhuru Kenyatta spoke of “an unfortunate incident this morning, which we are assessing”.
Appointing Education Minister Fred Matiangi as acting security minister, Kenyatta said there would be “no vacuum in securing our country”. (AFP)
