Gunmen attacked a college campus in northeast Kenya early Thursday, shooting indiscriminately in dormitories and killing at least two people and wounding 29 others, police said. The attack bore the hallmarks of a Somali Islamic extremist group.
Terrified students streamed out of buildings, some young men shirtless, as arriving police officers hunkered down, taking cover. The gunmen had opened fire at guards, triggering a "fierce shootout" with police guarding student dorms, Kenya's National Police Service said in a written statement.
The attackers managed to get into the dorms, raising the possibility of hostage-taking.
Kenya's National Disaster Operations Center said 29 people wounded during the attack have been admitted to a local hospital, four of them in critical condition. Most have gunshot wounds, the center said
Police and military surrounded the buildings and were trying to secure the area, police officer Musa Yego told The Associated Press.
The statement said police and members of other security agencies were "engaged in an elaborate process of flushing out the gunmen from the hostels."
Kenya's northern and eastern regions, which are near the Somali border, have suffered many attacks blamed on the al-Qaida-linked Somali group, al-Shabab, which has vowed retribution on Kenya for sending troops into Somalia to fight the militants. Kenya sent its troops there in 2011 to fight al-Shabab militants following cross-border attacks. Al-Shabab responded with a deadly attack on a mall in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, in 2013.
Last month, al-Shabab claimed responsibility for attacks in the county of Mandera on the Somali border in which twelve people died. Four of them died in an attack on the convoy of Mandera County Governor Ali Roba.
Police statistics show that 312 people have been killed in al-Shabab attacks in Kenya from 2012 to 2014. Thirty-eight people were killed and 149 wounded in Garissa in the same period, according to police statistics.