AU military base attack: Those killed ‘highly dismembered’

The military is investigating whether the murderous Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) terror group had a hand in last Friday’s attack on Kenya Defence Forces in Somalia in which tens of soldiers are reported to have been killed.

Government officials and military officers were tight lipped on the number of Kenyan soldiers killed or who went missing during the attack described as the worst since Kenya sent its troops to the neighbouring country to fight the Al Shabaab insurgency.

Prosecutors said Ahmed and Yusuf abandoned their homes in Sweden in 2008 to travel to Somalia, where they were born, to undergo military and doctrinal training with al Shabaab. “We are trying to search for them, rescue them and recover them”, Mwathethe said without saying if they were captured.

AMISOM and Kenyan forces had said Al-Shabab attacked a Somali National Army base and AMISOM forces counter-attacked.

The Shabab have also staged attacks in Kenya, killing at least 67 people at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in 2013, and massacring 148 people at a university in Garissa in April 2015.

He warned that the blood of KDF’s fallen heroes was not shed in vain and vowed to pursue the militants behind the attack.

Kenya has so far declined to say how many of its soldiers are dead, injured or missing but on Sunday a Shebab statement said that more than 100 Kenyan soldiers were killed and others captured.

In Friday’s raid, Abu Musab said the militants detonated a vehicle laden with explosives at the fence of the base in El-Adde and fired rocket-propelled grenades at the troops inside.

The Prime Minister also stressed that the cowardly terrorist attack by Al Shabab will not deter nor hamper the government’s astute plan in eliminating and eradicating the remnants of the terrorist group from the whole country.

The military camp which the attacker attacked is located about 550 km from the Kenyan border in Mogadishu’s south west Ceel Cedo district.

Mwathethe said the attack was launched against a company-sized force of soldiers, without making clear if this was the size of the Kenyan contingent in the area or the mixed force.