Explosions as militants storm hostel
Print Edition
AN explosion followed by gunfire woke students at Garissa’s Moi University in Kenya before dawn yesterday.
Around 5:30am an unknown number of masked gunmen began an assault by tossing explosives at the main gate before storming a nearby girl’s hostel.
More than 800 students attend the university and sleep in dormitories on the sprawling campus on the outskirts of the town in northeast Kenya.
“We were sleeping when we heard a loud explosion that was followed by gunshots and everyone started running for safety,” said student Japhet Mwala.
“There are those who were not able to leave the hostels where the gunmen headed and started firing, I am lucky to be alive because I jumped through the fence with other students,” said Mwala.
Another student said that when she first heard the explosion and gunfire, “we thought that it was power problems.”
But soon the horror of being caught up in the latest attack by the al-Qaida aligned militants from neighboring Somalia dawned on her.
“We started running away,” she said. She and other students fled their hostels and ran to nearby fields where they hid as the gunfire continued.
Rosalind Mugambi also fled to the fields with other students and “bullets following us.” She said some of her friends were injured by the gunfire.
“We saw some blood stains and they were shot,” she said.
Garissa has suffered chronic insecurity for years, fueled by political and business rivalries, and the conflict in neighboring Somalia which has driven hundreds of thousands of refugees to live in the nearby Dadaab camps.
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