NAIROBI, Dec 3: Kenya’s interior minister and police chief have been removed from their posts, hours after Somalia’s Shebab rebels carried out a fresh massacre in the northeast of the country.
In a televised address to the nation yesterday, President Uhuru Kenyatta also vowed his security forces will “intensify the war on terrorism” after a spate of killings in the country by the Al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents.
A group of Shebab rebels stormed into a quarry near the border town of Mandera shortly after midnight, and police and officials said they weeded out 36 non-Muslims for execution.
Those labourers not shot as they slept were placed in lines in the dusty quarry, with insurgents shooting most in the head but also beheading others.
Their bodies were flown to Nairobi later on Monday on a military transport plane.
The Shebab said in a statement their latest cross-border attack was fresh retaliation for Kenya’s 2011 invasion and continued presence in Somalia, as well as its treatment of Muslims in the troubled port city of Mombasa.
The assault came just over a week after the Shebab executed 28 people grabbed from a bus travelling from Mandera, on the frontier between Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.
Kenyatta, however, said Kenyan troops would stay put in Somalia, where they are now part of an African Union force battling the Shebab and supporting the war-torn country’s internationally-backed government.
“This is a war and a war that we must win, we must win it together,” he said. “The ultimate aim of this atrocious campaign is to create an extremist caliphate.”
He called the Shebab “deranged animals” who had killed more than 800 people in attacks inside Kenya, including 500 civilians and 300 security officers.
“We will not flinch or relent in the war against terrorism in our country and our region. We shall continue to inflict painful casualties on these terrorists until we secure our country and region.”
The Kenyan government has been under fire since last year’s Shebab attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, in which at least 67 people were killed in a siege involving just four gunmen and which lasted four days.
Sending condolences to the families of the latest victims, the United States said there was “no excuse or justification for this kind of terrorist violence.”
Washington had been “very clear about the threat posed” by Shebab, said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, adding US officials “vigorously condemn” the group’s “continued cowardly, brutal targeting of civilians.”
Worries over internal security mounted when Shebab rebels massacred 100 people in a string of raids against villages in the Lamu region on the Kenyan coast in June and July. (AGENCIES)
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