Religious leaders join hands yesterday in a peaceful demonstration in part of Nairobi to denounce Thursday’s Shabaab attack in Garissa University that saw 148 people killed PHOTO | AFP
Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said Abdirahim Abdullahi was one of the four gunmen who attacked the Garissa University College campus on Thursday, killing 148 people, among them 142 students.
Nairobi. Kenya on Sunday identified one of the Al Shabaab gunmen who massacred students at a northeastern university as the son of a Kenyan government official, the interior ministry said.
Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said Abdirahim Abdullahi was one of the four gunmen who attacked the Garissa University College campus on Thursday, killing 148 people, among them 142 students.
“The father had reported to security agents that his son had disappeared from home... and was helping the police try to trace his son by the time the Garissa terror attack happened,” said Njoka.
Abdirahim is said to have gone missing from his Mandera home one year ago with talk that he had joined the Somali militant group Al Shabaab and travelled to Syria.
His father Chief Abdullahi of Bulla said: “I buried Rahim long ago but the fact that my own blood took the lives of 100 innocents gives me enough regrets in life and has forever taken away my hopes of living humbly.”
Abdirahim Abdullahi was also a trained lawyer from the University of Nairobi and worked as a legal officer at a local bank.
Abdirahim was identified after the Kenya Defence Forces paraded four bodies of the slain terrorists in the streets of Garissa for identification.
Five other people were also arrested in connection with the attack.
The mastermind of the attack, Mohamed Mohamud aka Dulyadeyn, is a Kenyan of Somali origin. The suspected mastermind, Mohamed Mohamud, a former teacher at a Garissa madrassa, is still on the run. Kenya has offered a $215,000 (Sh450 million) reward for his arrest.
President Uhuru Kenyatta said on Saturday that those behind the attack were “deeply embedded” in Kenya, and called on Kenyan Muslims to help prevent radicalization.
Four suspects were Kenyans of Somali origin, and the fifth was Tanzanian, the ministry said.
A Shabab spokesman, Ali Mohamoud Raghe, said the attack had been carried out because “the Christian government of Kenya has invaded our country,” a reference to the Kenyan military’s 2011 incursion into Somalia to oust the Al Shabaab from its strongholds.
He said the university had been targeted because it was educating many Christian students in “a Muslim land under colony,” a reference to the large Somali population in a part of Kenya that Somalia once tried to claim. He called the university part of Kenya’s “plan to spread their Christianity and infidelity.”
Kenya shares a long, porous border (435 miles) with Somalia and has long suffered from instability in its neighborhood. Al-Shabaab controls southern parts of Somalia, where the common border exists.
Al-Shabaab has a Kenyan affiliate, called al Hijra, which exploits perceptions among sections of Muslims about their marginalization.
Al-Shabaab has been seeking to retaliate for Kenya’s decision to send troops to Somalia in 2011 to fight the terror group. It is estimated that Al-Shabaab killed at least 400 people and injured over 1,000 in more than 100 attacks between 2011 and 2014.
The same terror group also attacked Nairobi’s Westgate Mall on Sept. 21, 2013, leaving at least 68 dead and 175 wounded. This week’s attack was even more brutal.
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