By KENFREY KIBERENGE

Security agencies are scratching their heads following an emerging trend where terror activities are being directed at soft targets.

Like in the rest of the world, Kenya’s security agencies are agonising on how to prevent attacks on places such as nightclubs, bus termini, supermarkets and shopping malls as well as places of worship.

The helplessness is best illustrated by a grenade attack a few weeks ago on a church in Ngara that claimed one life and left scores injured, despite a standing alert over a looming terror attack issued by the US and UK embassies within the same week.

However, there is consensus that there is no known tactic to completely eliminate attacks on such places, although the same could be reduced.

Deputy Police Spokesman Charles Owino admits that while they have been able to foil numerous planned attacks on bigger targets, stopping attacks on the soft targets has been tricky.

“It is not possible to have police officers all over,” he said. Soft targets are areas not subject to special protection that are frequented by the public.

With attention shifting to high security areas such as the airports, barracks, embassies and Government offices, places such as nightclubs, churches and bus stations have been left exposed.

These targets do not have the benefit of protection of by the Government, though some of them such as places of worship; business establishments may have their own physical security measures.

Big establishments including mainstream churches and shopping malls have hired private security guards to frisk visitors but smaller outlets and churches have thrown caution to the wind.

Kenya Episcopal Conference Secretary General Fr Vincent Wambugu says the Catholic Church has put in place measures to ensure that their faithful are safe.

“We frisk them as they enter the church and we urge the security personnel to treat each day as a new day to avoid being complacent. However, I cannot tell how long this will go on,” said Wambugu. In smaller Pentecostal churches, though, faithful just file in on Sundays.

Kenya has of late seen attacks on such places since her defence forces crossed over to Somalia to pursue Al Shabaab militants.

In March, six people were killed and more than 60 injured in an attack at the busy Machakos bus station in Nairobi when four grenades were thrown from a moving car.

One person was also killed after a grenade was hurled at a Christian meeting in Mombasa the same month, months after a grenade attack at Mwauras bar and another one at OTC bus station in Nairobi, left one person dead and several others injured.

Near impossible

Owino says having CCTV cameras mounted on streets, shopping malls, churches and nightclubs could neutralise the attacks, citing the existence of security cameras in banks as the reason heists have reduced over the years.

“A would-be attacker will fear because they know that we will catch them with time,” said Owino.

Yesterday, the National Council of Churches of Kenya appealed to the Government to lower the cost of CCTV cameras through tax rebates to enable churches mount the same in the halls for surveillance.

Attacks on soft targets are said to demonstrate the capability of terror groups to operate without being detected by the intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies.

Security expert Bahukutumbi Raman in a book titled Terrorism: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow, argues that such attacks are designed to discredit the intelligence agencies, the police and other security agencies in the eyes of the people by demonstrating their capability to strike despite the vigilance of these agencies.

In their calculation, the result should be a gradual loss of faith of the people in the efficacy of these agencies.

In addition, they want to force the security agencies to over-react through large-scale arrests of the members of the community from which the terrorists have arisen and the ensuing use of harsh methods to interrogate them.

This in turn creates animosity towards the police and the Government in the ‘victim-community’ and adds to their sense of alienation.

“There are hundreds of thousands of potential soft targets for terrorists all over the country. It would be just impossible for the Government to provide them with physical security,” says Raman. Although it is a near impossibility to totally eliminate attacks on soft targets, it is possible to reduce them through effective intelligence gathering and policing and encouraging the public to raise an alarm whenever they spot suspicious-looking persons and objects.

Simple measures

But despite the measures put in place, the situation is complicated by what The Economist dubs “the country’s happy-go-lucky outlook”.

This is where after few days of intensive security checks, people tend to resign to fate and assume things have normalised.

Those in charge of security in some of the outlets also do not even attempt even the simplest of the measures.

As a result, it is common to spot a security guard ushering visitors in using the metal detector into a supermarket or a bus.

Most nightclubs also do not frisk revellers in the early hours of the evening and only do so as their joints begin to fill up.