Somali militants massacre students

Medics help an injured person at Kenyatta national Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya, after an attack by gunmen at Garissa University College. Photo: AP

It took just four gunmen to demonstrate Kenya's impotence against the Somali militant group al-Shabab.

In an attack heavy with foreboding symbolism, al-Shabab massacred 147 college students, all or most of them Christians, in the eastern city of Garissa . At least 79 were injured, and the four gunmen were also killed.

Survivors described their terror on Thursday asgunmen searched dormitories, asking students whether they were Muslims and executing any Christians.

A Kenya Defence Forces soldier secures the area around the Garissa University college, in Garissa, Kenya.

Earlier in the day, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta downplayed the attack's severity, although it was known that hundreds were trapped, telling Kenyans that several were killed and wounded.

Unconfirmed local news reports suggested some students at Garissa University College were beheaded, as furious critics railed at the failure of security forces to prevent mass terrorist attacks on civilians.

Many said authorities should have boosted security at the campus, an obvious target with a mixed Muslim and Christian student body in northern Kenya, after specific intelligence warnings in recent days of an impending attack on a Kenyan university. Others bemoaned that a tragedy mirroring al-Shabab's 2013 attack at the Westgate mall in Nairobi, the capital, which killed 67, could have occurred, with even greater casualties.

Survivors described how men with machine guns swiftly shot down the two police officers guarding the college before swooping into the campus, spraying bullets everywhere and taking control of one dormitory. A small group of militants, most likely between four and 10, roved dorm to dorm, separating Christian from Muslim students and killing the Christians, the authorities said. Students described being awakened before dawn by the sound of gunfire and fleeing for their lives as masked attackers closed in.

Officials said that by the time Kenyan commandos cornered and killed the attackers on an upper floor, 147 people lay dead.

The targeting of Christians, a classic al-Shabab tactic, is designed to ramp up tension between the nation's Muslim and Christian populations, helping it attract more recruits, analysts said.

The attack also underscored the persistent failures of Kenya's security services: the corruption that allows al-Shabab fighters to easily penetrate the border and move around the country; the intelligence shortcomings; and the heavy-handed harassment of Kenya's Muslim population that drives alienated, jobless young men into the arms of extremists.

More than 100 students were held hostage on the campus as the 15-hour siege dragged into the night. As darkness fell, a series of deafening explosions rang out, according to reports from the scene.

"The operation has ended successfully. Four terrorists have been killed," Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery told reporters in Garissa. In the grisly finale, the gunmen, strapped with explosives, were blown up as Kenyan forces moved in, firing, he said.

Al-Shabab has suffered recent setbacks in Somalia, with the killings of its secretive commander, Ahmed Abdi Godane, and other top figures in US drone attacks. But it remains capable of carrying out devastating attacks in Somalia and neighbouring countries, often using just a few gunmen.

The attack on Thursday was its bloodiest, and the second deadliest in Kenya after the 1998 US Embassy bombing in Nairobi.

Ken Menkhaus, an al-Shabab and terrorism expert at Davidson College in North Carolina, said that though the group was growing weaker in Somalia, it was gaining strength in Kenya. He described the college attack as "tragic and predictable".

"They have been looking at soft targets in northern Kenya where they can operate more easily than in Nairobi," he said. "It was a very easy target of opportunity for them that was going to have a very big impact on Kenyans."

The authorities said that the attack began when the gunmen killed two guards standing by the main gate of the university. Panicked students streamed out of the besieged university with chilling stories of witnessing their classmates being killed. Augustine Alanga, 21, an economics student, said he had been asleep in his dormitory when the shooting began. He said he bolted from his room without stopping to put on his shoes, cutting his feet as he sprinted barefoot across the campus and into a nearby forest.

"When I looked back, I saw them," Alanga recalled. "There were five or six of them. They were masked. And they were shooting live rounds."

Officials said all students were accounted for. More than 800 were on campus during the attack; 587 fled or were rescued, a figure that apparently does not include the injured. Dozens of injured students were flown to Nairobi for treatment.

Authorities named the commander behind the attack as a former schoolteacher, Mohammed Mohamud, an ethnic Somali who also goes by the names Dulyadin and Gamadheere and is a major al-Shabab figure from southern Somalia's Middle Juba region. The Kenyan Interior Ministry released a photograph of Mohamud and offered a reward of $220,000 for information leading to his arrest. Authorities placed a $55,000 bounty on his head in December.

Claiming responsibility for the attack, al-Shabab said in a statement that the university was on Muslim land and was there to promulgate "missionary activities and to spread deviant ideology".

The attack came less than a week after a similar al-Shabab attack on a hotel in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, killed 24 people. 

Menkhaus said al-Shabab, allied with al-Qaeda, had been overshadowed in recent months by the Islamic State group, which has attracted thousands of foreign recruits.

"Some of what they're doing is to try to regain ground. They've been completely overshadowed in the public eye by the Islamic State in the past year. These attacks are some attempt to try to regain attention, and they've succeeded in doing that," he said.

Kenya is more than 80 per cent Christian. About 11 per cent of the population is Muslim.

Los Angeles Times