Mombasa: Attackers shot dead six people Sunday and wounded at least 20 others when they burst into a church service in Likoni, near the Kenyan port city of Mombasa, spraying the congregation with bullets, police said. According to reports, the gunmen walked “casually” into the service and shouted in an unidentified foreign language before opening fire.
Kenya’s National Disaster Operation Center said there had been mass casualties in the attack, on the evangelical New Testament Church. No group or organization has claimed responsibility for the attack so far, but Kenya has been hit by a series of similar attacks since sending troops into southern Somalia in October 2011 to battle the al-Qaida-linked Shebab insurgents.
Kenyan troops, which have since joined the African Union force in Somalia, are taking part in a fresh offensive against Shebab bases launched this month. Kenya and Uganda, another key contributor of troops to the AU force, have both warned of the threat of fresh Shebab attacks in their own countries.
The attack on the church comes six months after Shebab commandos carried out the September massacre in Nairobi’s Westgate mall in which at least 67 people were killed. The group said the carnage was retribution for Kenya’s military role in Somalia.
The latest attack also comes just days after police arrested two men with a vehicle stashed full of large quantities of powerful explosives prepared in pipe bombs, which experts said would have been strong enough to bring down a major building. Kenya’s top security chiefs warned last month of “increased threats of radicalization among homegrown Islamists.
Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku on Saturday said that security had been beefed up in Mombasa, as well as in the capital Nairobi and other towns. Our officers are out there, they are doing everything possible to fight crime and terrorism, he said in a statement.
But tensions are high between the security forces and radical Muslim youth. Last month police raided a mosque accused of encouraging extremism in Mombasa, detaining scores of suspects whom they accused of attending a radicalization meeting.
Several senior Muslim leaders have been gunned down on the coast, with their supporters accusing the police of state-sponsored assassinations – claims the security forces deny. Homegrown groups including the Islamist Al-Hijra group, a radical organisation formerly known as the Muslim Youth Center, operate on Kenya’s coast and have been linked to the Shebab.
Bureau report
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