Five civilians were killed, and some beheaded, in an attack on Saturday night in two villages in eastern Kenya claimed by radical Islamist Al-Shabaab, AFP learned Sunday from police sources and residents.
The attack was carried out around 7:30 p.m. (4:30 p.m. GMT) on Saturday in the villages of Juhudi and Salama, located in the coastal county of Lamu, which borders Somalia, according to these sources.
“Five people were killed (…) The victims had their throats cut and there are others who were beheaded,” a police source told AFP.
“They (the attackers) were armed with machetes and some had firearms, but they were not shot. The victims were beheaded and there are others who were beheaded,” added the source.
A resident of one of the villages, Hassan Abdul, said that “the women were locked in the houses and the men were thrown out, they were tied with ropes and massacred.”
“In total, five people were killed, including a high school student. (…) All those killed had their throats cut and some were beheaded,” he added, assuring that he had counted between 20 and 30 attackers.
According to another resident, Ismail Hussein, the attackers also seized residents’ property, including food, before fleeing, shooting into the air.
Lamu County Warden Louis Rono confirmed the attack but did not release a death toll. “We have increased security in this area after the attack last night,” he said on Sunday.
Al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Shabaab claimed in a statement that it had carried out an operation in the village of Juhudi, claiming to have killed “six members of the Kenyan infidels” and “burnt down ten houses where Christians resided.”
deadly attacks
The shebab have been fighting for more than 15 years against the Somali federal government, supported by the international community, in order to establish Islamic law in this country in the Horn of Africa.
Since its military intervention in southern Somalia in 2011 and its participation in the African Union force in Somalia (Amisom, now Atmis) created in 2012 to fight this insurrection, neighboring Kenya has also been targeted by this group, which it also recruits local youth.
Deadly attacks targeted the Westgate shopping center in the capital Nairobi in September 2013 (67 dead), Garissa University in April 2015 (148 dead) and the Dusit hotel complex, also in Nairobi, in January 2019 ( 21 dead).
Many other minor attacks often target police officers and civilians in the border counties of Mandera, Wajir, Garissa and Lamu, where the resort island of the same name is located.
Saturday’s meeting took place in the vicinity of Mpeketoni, an inland city located about 450 kilometers as the crow flies from the capital, Nairobi, and about 120 kilometers from the Somali border.
The area had already been the subject of an attack attributed to Shebab on January 2, 2022, in which one man was beheaded and five others shot or burned, according to a police report.
In 2014, a series of raids claimed by the shebab had killed 100 people.
On June 14, eight police officers were killed when their vehicle was destroyed by an improvised explosive device in Garissa County.
Kenya and Somalia announced on May 15 a phased reopening at three points along their land border, which had been officially closed in 2011 in an attempt to curb Al-Shabaab attacks.
Source: BFM TV
