How gang laid ambush at police station, killed nine

Tana River, Kenya: The same night killers stormed Malamande village in Hindi location, another group of attackers struck Gamba Police Station in Tana River County, almost 80 kilometres away.

At around 11pm, a band of attackers estimated by police officers to have been around 50, surrounded the isolated station and opened fire.

The station has no electricity and the four officers on duty that night did not see the attackers who had besieged their station until they shot one of their own.

Corporal Michael Marka was going to the station to hand over to a colleague for the night shift when the attackers shot him in the leg.

His colleagues knew the moment of reckoning had come and scrambled from their houses to get their guns. They were 20 of them and they put up a brief fight.

“I thought at first they were bandits,” said a police officer who engaged the fighters. “But when I heard the sounds of the guns they were using, I knew we were in big trouble. Most of us realised that we were facing a superior enemy in terms of firepower. And they had surrounded us from all sides. We stood no chance,” said the officer.

But they put up a brave, though brief, fight in which Sergeant Boniface Ngare was shot in the chest and died on the spot. Corporal Patricia Mueni was injured in the arm and is being treated alongside Corporal Marka.

As they took over the station, the attackers proceeded to the holding cell where they found several prisoners. They released two who were Muslims and killed five others.

One of the attackers recorded the entire raid, the officers say. As the attackers celebrated their “victory”, a lorry drove in from Witu on its way to Garissa then Nairobi. Its destination was Gamba Police Station.

It was carrying scrap metal bought from Manda Airport in Lamu by two businessmen, Julius Nderitu Githua and Paul Kibugi Kagera, both from Kamukunji, Nairobi.

They were five people in the lorry; Githua, the lorry driver who had been sourced from Lamu, their friend Joseph Ndungu Kimani, the conductor of the lorry called Muthama and finally, a man they had given a lift and whose name they did not know. Kagera was in Nairobi communicating with his friend about the progress of transporting their cargo, but would soon be a bearer of sad news.

As they approached Gamba Police Station, the attackers motioned them to stop and ordered them to get out. Soon, they realised it was not a usual police check.

The attackers ordered them to lie flat on their stomachs and took their national identity cards and mobile phones. Salim, the driver was placed aside because he is a Muslim.

 

After this, the militants shot the four helpless victims for belonging to the “wrong” religion. In the melee, the man who had hiked lift escaped to safety. The other three were killed.

Impending attack

Their deaths, said Kagera, had a cruel ironical twist to it. The reason for them travelling at night was to seek safety at Gamba after they received reports of an impending attack in Witu. “The broker who organised transport for us called my friend and told him not to sleep in Witu. He said he had received information that people were coming to attack it. He advised him to proceed to Gamba and spend the night at the police station. Nderitu informed me of the developments and he called me just as he arrived at Gamba. It was 11:28 pm. That was the last time we spoke,” he said.

Around three o’clock in the morning, the attackers boarded the truck and ordered the driver to drive back towards Witu. Salim realised that they were hungry.

“They kept on asking me for food,” he said. He also noticed that one of the fighters was being carried on the shoulder, bleeding profusely from the stomach while another one was limping, also bleeding from the leg. They had been shot, but whether from acts of the heroic although brief defence of the Gamba police officers or from their own “friendly fire” is unknown.

About 20 kilometres from Gamba, they ordered the driver to stop and the attackers got out to make their escape to the forest where they had come from on foot.

Salim turned back his lorry, but not far off, one of them shot the rear tires. He escaped to Witu on foot to seek help.

It is not yet clear why the attackers chose to attack the police station, but the officers there have dismissed claims that the attackers were trying to free some of their members arrested by the police. “The person people are talking about never escaped. In fact they never broke into his cell. I believe they released the other two because they were Muslims. They had been charged with petty crimes. I want to think that this group was making a bold statement of what it is capable of,” said an officer at the station.  This attack, which left 9 people dead in Gamba area, took place on the night before DP William Ruto visited the area.