Slain victims of Al Shabaab attack in Lamu named and buried

LAMU COUNTY: Police have identified the slain victims of Monday's attack on a police vehicle in the area blamed on Al Shabaab.

Authorities also reported that cartridges and evidence collected from the scene of the carnage indicates the attackers fired Kalashnikov and machine guns and also lobbed petrol bombs at unarmed passengers.

Yesterday, the skeletal remains of three women and two children were taken to a local hospital for post-mortem examination and later returned to their native homes in Ijara sub-county of Garissa county for burial.

Last evening, County Coordinating Police Commander Chrispus Mutali told The Standard that a victim who was shot and survived the attack, identified as Khadija Abdi, has been transferred to Coast General Hospital in Mombasa for treatment.

"The names of the deceased are Halima Amin, Guthow Farah, Halao Abaya, Hawo Ali and Abaye Musa," Mutali said.

He said the latter two were children and the others women who had sought a lift from the police vehicle before it come under attack and was struck by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED), rifle fire and petrol bombs.

UNARMED CIVILIANS

Mutali said there is no indication the deceased were shot, besides being burned. They discounted reports that the fire that gutted the vehicle and victims was caused by a grenade.

He repeated Monday's claims that militants immobilised the vehicle - which had traveled from Bodhay in Ijara towards Hindi in Lamu, and then opened fire from rifles before lobbing petrol bombs - with the unarmed passengers stuck inside it.

"From the cartridges collected at the scene, we also established that the militants also had machine guns, which can strike targets as far as two kilometres away," he said, adding that about 20 attackers were involved in the ambush.

In recent weeks, Islamist militants have stepped up their attacks in this general area starting with early May when they began launching IED attacks in parts of Korahindi and Sangailu in Ijara.

DARING RAID

They then gradually moved southwards into Lamu where they launched a daring raid on a Kenya Defence Forces camp at Baure, outside Bargoni, on June 14, killing two soldiers on the spot.

Three other KDF soldiers later died in an IED explosion on the same day.

The attacks were blamed on Jaysh Ayman, a militant cell composed of Kenyan and foreign Islamist fighters, and the leader of the cell Luqman Issa Osman and British jihadist Thomas Evans were killed together with 19 other militants.

Last week, militants fired at a bus convoy with police escort travelling between Hindi and Mokowe and missed.