The assault by al-Shabab occurred in villages that border Somalia, an space the place the group typically carries out raids.
5 civilians have been killed by armed assailants who attacked two villages in southeast Kenya, police mentioned.
The assault on Sunday occurred within the villages of Juhudi and Salama in Lamu County, which borders Somalia, the police supply mentioned.
The attackers additionally burned homes and destroyed property.
A 60-year-old man was sure with a rope and “his throat slit, his home was burnt with all belongings”, police mentioned. Three others had been killed in an analogous method whereas a fifth sufferer was shot.
Resident Hassan Abdul mentioned that “ladies had been locked within the homes and the lads ordered out, the place they had been tied with ropes and butchered”.
A secondary college scholar was among the many 5 individuals killed, Abdul mentioned, including that “all these killed had been slashed and a few of them had been beheaded”.
One other native resident, Ismail Hussein, mentioned that the fighters stole meals provides earlier than leaving, firing their arms into the air.
Police described the incident as a “terrorist assault”, a phrase they usually use to seek advice from incursions by Somalia’s al-Shabab group.
Lamu is close to Kenya’s border with Somalia and fighters from al-Shabab steadily perform assaults within the space in a bid to push Kenya to withdraw troops from Somalia, the place they’re a part of a world peacekeeping power defending the central authorities.
Kenya first despatched troops into Somalia in 2011 to fight the al-Qaeda-affiliated group and is now a significant contributor of troops to an African Union (AU) army operation towards the group.
Nevertheless it has suffered a string of retaliatory assaults, together with a bloody siege on the Westgate mall in Nairobi in 2013 that claimed 67 lives and an assault on Garissa College in 2015 that killed 148 individuals.
In Somalia itself, al-Shabab has continued to wage lethal assaults regardless of a significant offensive launched final August by pro-government forces, backed by the AU Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS).
ATMIS, which has 22,000 troops, has been aiding Somalia’s federal authorities in its battle towards al-Shabab since 2022, when it changed the AU Mission in Somalia (AMISOM).
Final week, 4 individuals had been killed in northeast Kenya, with police saying al-Shabab was accountable. The incident happened when a car was escorting a convoy of buses between the cities of Banisa and Mandera. One other safety group from Banisa was attacked when it responded, police mentioned.
On June 14, eight Kenyan law enforcement officials had been killed when their car was destroyed by an improvised explosive system in a suspected assault by al-Shabab, police mentioned.
Within the final two weeks, assaults linked to al-Shabab have killed one other 10 individuals, based on police studies.
