NAIROBI, June 15 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Eight Kenyan police officers were killed when their vehicle was blown up by an improvised explosive device in a suspected attack by Somalia-based militant group al-Shabaab, police said.
The incident took place on Tuesday in Garissa county in eastern Kenya, a region on the border with Somalia, where al-Shabaab has been waging a bloody insurgency against the fragile government in Mogadishu for more than 15 years.
“We lost eight police officers in this attack,” North Eastern Regional Commissioner John Otieno said.
“We suspect the work of al-Shabaab who are now targeting security forces and passenger vehicles.”
Kenya first sent troops into Somalia in 2011 to combat the Al-Qaeda-affiliated militants and is now a major contributor of troops to an African Union military operation against the group.
But it has suffered a string of retaliatory assaults, including a bloody siege at the Westgate mall in Nairobi in 2013 that cost 67 lives and an attack on Garissa University in 2015 that killed 148 people.
In Somalia itself, al-Shabaab has continued to wage deadly attacks despite a major offensive launched last August by pro-government forces, backed by the AU force known as ATMIS.
In one of the worst recent attacks, 54 Ugandan peacekeepers were killed when al-Shabaab fighters stormed an African Union base in Buulo Mareer, Somalia on May 26, according to Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni.
However, combined armed infantry and motorised units of the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) recaptured Buulo Mareer town and the surrounding villages from the al Shabaab terror group, the army has said.
According to UPDF, the rescue combat forces met resistance from al-Shabaab snipers positioned in storeyed buildings and other pockets of resistance from fleeing remnants.
On Saturday, Somali police said six civilians were killed in a six-hour siege by the militants at a beachside hotel in Mogadishu.
