Nairobi: Five civilians have been killed by armed assailants who attacked two villages in southeast Kenya, police said.
The attack on Sunday ocurred in the villages of Juhudi and Salama in Lamu County, which borders Somalia, the police source said.
The attackers also burned houses and destroyed property.
A 60-year-old man was bound with a rope and “his throat slit, his house was burnt with all belongings”, police said. Three others were killed in a similar manner while a fifth victim was shot.
Resident Hassan Abdul said that “women were locked in the houses and the men ordered out, where they were tied with ropes and butchered”.
A secondary school student was among the five people killed, Abdul said, adding that “all those killed were slashed and some of them had been beheaded”.
Another local resident, Ismail Hussein, said that the fighters stole food supplies before leaving, firing their arms into the air.
Police described the incident as a “terrorist attack”, a phrase they typically use to refer to incursions by Somalia’s al-Shabab group. Lamu is near Kenya’s border with Somalia and fighters from al-Shabab frequently carry out attacks in the area in a bid to push Kenya to withdraw troops from Somalia, where they are part of an international peacekeeping force defending the central government. –Agencies
