NAIROBI: In a horrific attack, militants from the Al-Shabaab group have killed five civilians, some of them beheaded, in eastern Kenya, according to a witness and a police source cited by AFP on Sunday.
The assault took place on Saturday at around 7:30 pm (1630 GMT) in the villages of Juhudi and Salama, located in Lamu county, which shares a border with Somalia, revealed the police source. “Five people were killed. The victims were slashed, and there are others who were beheaded,” the source stated.
Resident Hassan Abdul described the chilling scene, saying, “Women were locked in the houses and the men ordered out, where they were tied with ropes and butchered.” Shockingly, among the five victims was a secondary school student, Abdul added, emphasizing that “all those killed were slashed, and some of them had been beheaded.”
Another local resident, Ismail Hussein, disclosed that the militants looted food supplies before departing, firing their weapons into the air.
Militants Attacks in Kenya
The Al-Shabaab group, based in neighboring Somalia, has been conducting a ruthless insurgency against the fragile government in Mogadishu for over 15 years. In 2011, Kenya deployed its troops into Somalia to counter the militants and has since become a significant contributor of forces to an African Union military operation against the group.
However, Kenya has experienced a series of retaliatory attacks, including the notorious siege at Nairobi’s Westgate mall in 2013, which claimed 67 lives, and the assault on Garissa University in 2015, resulting in the deaths of 148 individuals.
Meanwhile, Al-Shabaab has continued to carry out deadly attacks within Somalia itself, despite a major offensive launched in August of the previous year by pro-government forces, with support from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM).
