Kenya says government official’s son was one of masked gunmen
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THE son of a Kenyan government official was one of the masked gunmen who killed nearly 150 people at a university last week, the interior ministry said yesterday, as Kenyan churches hired armed guards to protect their Easter congregations.
At the Vatican City, Pope Francis decried Thursday's attack in his Easter Sunday service, praying for those killed by Islamist gunmen who hunted down Christians while sparing Muslims.
At one church in Mombasa, worshippers were evacuated and a bomb disposal unit deployed due to a suspicious vehicle parked outside the church. Police took it away for further examination.
Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said Abdirahim Abdullahi was one of four gunmen who stormed the college campus in Garissa, some 200km from the Somali border.
An ethnic Somali with Kenyan nationality, his father is a government official in the northern Mandera county bordering Somalia, he said.
“The father had reported to security agents that his son had disappeared from home... and was helping the police try to trace his son by the time the Garissa terror attack happened,” Njoka told reporters.
President Uhuru Kenyatta on Saturday said the planners and financiers of Islamist attacks were “deeply embedded” within Kenyan communities and urged Muslims to do more to fight radicalization. Ali Roba, the governor of Mandera county, said Kenya had “massive radicalization problems, not only in the northern counties, but across the country.”
A Garissa-based official said the government was aware Abdullahi, a former University of Nairobi law student, had joined al-Shabab after graduating in 2013: “He was a very brilliant student. But then he got these crazy ideas.”
Al-Shabab said Garissa was revenge for Kenya sending troops into Somalia to fight alongside African Union peacekeepers against it. The al-Qaida-aligned group has threatened to turn more Kenyan cities “red with blood.”
Police have stepped up security at shopping malls and public buildings in the capital Nairobi, and the eastern coastal region frequently targeted by al-Shabab. Militant attacks on Christians have damaged Kenya’s traditionally cordial Christian-Muslim relations. Christians make up 83 percent of Kenya’s 44 million population.
The head of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics prayed “for peace, above all, for Syria and Iraq, that the roar of arms may cease.” He called on the international community to “not stand by before the immense humanitarian tragedy unfolding in these countries and the drama of the numerous refugees” created by the two conflicts.
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