14 reported killed when al-Shabaab Islamists attack University in Kenya

At least 14 people were killed on Thursday when al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militant group al-Shabaab stormed a Kenyan university campus, taking Christians hostage and engaging security forces in a shootout for several hours.

With scores of students wounded and hundreds unaccounted for, police and soldiers surrounded Garissa University College. They sealed off the compound and were trying to flush out the gunmen, Kenyan police chief Joseph Boinet said.

Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the pre-dawn attack near the Somali border. The group has a record of raids on Kenyan soil in retaliation for Nairobi sending troops to fight it in its home state of Somalia.

Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, al-Shabaab’s military operations spokesman, said it was holding many Christian hostages inside. “We sorted people out and released the Muslims,” he told reporter. “Fighting still goes on inside the college.”

Boinet said the attackers had “shot indiscriminately” while inside the university compound. At least 14 people had been killed, including two security personnel, a policeman at the scene said, while the Red Cross said 50 students had been freed.

Interior Secretary Joseph Nkaissery said 280 of the 815 students at the university had been accounted for and efforts were under way to track down the others, according to the Twitter feed of Kenya’s national disaster agency. It did not say how many students remained trapped on the campus. Some had managed to escape unaided.

“We have 49 casualties so far, all with bullet and (shrapnel) wounds,” said a doctor at Garissa hospital.

Al-Shabaab, which seeks to impose its own harsh version of sharia law, has separated Muslims from Christians in some of its previous raids in Kenya, notably late last year in attacks on a bus and at a quarry.

Its repeated raids, together with attacks on churches by home-grown Islamist groups, have strained the historically cordial relations between Kenya’s Muslim and Christian communities.

Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta was due to address the nation later on Thursday about the attack on Garissa, a town 200 kilometers (120 miles) from the porous Somali border that al-Shabaab has previously raided.

Al-Shabaab has previously declared it would punish Kenya for sending troops into Somalia to fight it alongside African Union peacekeepers. The group was responsible for a deadly attack in 2013 on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi.

Source: Reuters