By Andrew Ross
NAIROBI, Kenya
Al-Shabaab militants in the early hours of Tuesday infiltrated Kenya from Somali territory and stormed a residential estate in Kenya’s northeastern province, where they killed 14 people, government officials said.
“A group of armed Al-Shabaab terrorists snuck in from Somalia and raided a residential estate in the town of Mandera,” Major-General Joseph Nkaisserry, Kenyan cabinet secretary for the interior and coordination of national government, told reporters in Nairobi.
According to Nkaisserry, the attackers – who, he said, had hoped to “execute” the estate’s 150 residents – had already killed 11 people before police arrived at the scene.
“Eleven Kenyans were killed in the attack, while three others later succumbed to injuries,” the official asserted.
He went on to commend the “swift action” by police, who, he said, had “safely evacuated 136 residents who were facing imminent danger of slaughter.”
Nkaisserry said the attackers had fled back to Somalia after engaging police in a shootout. He refrained from saying, however, whether any of the militants had been killed in the gunfight.
He also noted that Kenyan police and Defense Forces had dispatched three helicopters to the area to evacuate injured residents.
According to the official, security forces were currently carrying out a “mopping-up operation” in the area.
Most residents of the targeted estate are believed to be quarry workers.
Last December, Al-Shabaab militants are said to have killed 36 quarry workers in the same area.
Somalia’s Al-Shabaab has vowed to continue striking targets in Kenya as long as Nairobi maintains its four-year-old military presence in troubled Somalia.
In 2013, Al-Shabaab killed 67 people at Nairobi’s Westgate Shopping Mall. And in April of this year, the militant group killed 148 people – mostly students – at Northern Kenya’s Garissa University.
