At least 15 people were killed at a university campus in eastern Kenya in an attack claimed by al-Qaeda-linked gunmen, police said.
Fifty-six people were hospitalized in the Thursday assault on Garissa University, county police Commander Charles Kinyua told reporters in Garissa town, about 145 kilometers (90 miles) from the border with Somalia, home of the al-Shabaab militant group. At least 530 others are missing amid reports some of them may have been taken hostage.
A student who fled, Njeri Maina, said three assailants entered the university’s main accommodation building carrying assault rifles and grenades. They shouted in Arabic, then Swahili, telling everybody to lie down before they opened fire, she said by phone. Maina said she escaped through a back entrance after security forces started engaging the militants.
Attacks in Kenya soared after the government in 2011 sent troops into Somalia to fight al-Shabaab following a wave of kidnappings and the murder of a British tourist in Kenya that the government blamed on the group.
One suspected gunman was arrested while trying to flee the scene on Thursday, Kenya’s Interior Ministry said on its Twitter account.
Al-Shabaab spokesman Abdul Aziz Abu Musab said his group was responsible for the attack. Speaking to Radio Andalus, a Somalia-based broadcaster that backs the insurgents, he said the militants stormed into the university compound, took control and killed “many Christian enemies.”
Some students were being held captive in the university’s student accommodation while security forces and Kenyan troops exchanged gunfire with the assailants, Kinyua said earlier. Kenya’s Interior Ministry said that police were flushing out the gunmen and had secured three of the four hostels they had entered.
Al-Shabaab has waged an insurgency in Somalia since 2006 in a bid to impose Islamic law. In September 2013, the Islamist militia claimed responsibility for an attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi that left 67 people dead and the country has faced bombings of bars, churches, and markets.
The British government on March 27 raised its travel warning for Kenya, asking its nationals to avoid non-essential trips to a wider area of the coast than its previous advisory, including the port city of Mombasa’s airport. The same day the Australian government warned that terrorists may be planning attacks in crowded locations in Nairobi “in the near future.”
The militants may have chosen the university as a “soft target, an area with a big population,” Emmanuel Kisiangani, a Nairobi-based senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, said by phone.
“Al-Shabaab usually come up with attacks when they are perceived to be at their weakest point. I think they did this as part of the agenda to assert themselves.”