According to authorities, armed gunmen who invaded two villages in southeast Kenya killed 5 residents, according to a report by Al Jazeera on Sunday.
According to a police source, the attack took place on Sunday in the villages of Juhudi and Salama in Lamu County, which borders Somalia. The attackers also set fire to many homes and destroyed goods.
Police said, “A 60-year-old man was bound with a rope and his throat slit, his house burnt with all belonging. Three others were killed in a similar manner while a fifth victim was shot.”
“Women were locked in the houses and the men ordered out, where they were tied with ropes and butchered,” said a resident Hassan Abdul.
Abdul stated that among the five deceased was a student from a secondary school and that “all those killed were slashed and some of them had been beheaded.”
Another nearby resident, Ismail Hussein, stated that the fighters took food supplies before escaping while blazing their rifles into the air. The incident was called a “terrorist attack” by authorities, a phrase commonly used to describe invasions by the al-Shabab insurgent group in Somalia.
According to Al Jazeera, Al-Shabab rebels often launch attacks in Lamu, which is near to Kenya’s border with Somalia, in an attempt to persuade Kenya to withdraw its troops from Somalia, where they are part of an international peacekeeping force defending the central government.
Kenya sent its first troops to Somalia in 2011 to battle al-Qaeda-linked militants, and it is currently a major supplier of troops to an African Union (AU) military operation against the group.