Somalia:Four Kenya escapee soldiers killed near El Adde

The operation is “delicate” because some Kenyan soldiers have been captured and are being used as human shields, he said.

Al-Shabab spokesman Abdiaziz Abu Mudan said on the group’s online radio that at least 63 soldiers were killed in the attack in southwestern Somalia that started Friday.

“These attacks show AU troops are not forging relationship with locals”, he said.

“We will fight them deep in their hideouts, smoke them out of the caves, follow them to the end in honour of every drop of blood of fellow Kenyans”, said he.

She said on Sunday, when several injured soldiers arrived, that the Kenya Defence Forces set up counselling centres in Eldoret, Gilgil and at the Armed Forces Memorial Hospital in Nairobi. “We have engaged the enemy and severely degraded him”, he added.

The group has been slowly pushed out of most of Somalia’s major cities, but continues to launch guerilla attacks within the country. If the death toll is confirmed, it would be the highest number of casualties Kenya’s military has suffered in a single incident since its troops invaded southern Somalia in October 2011.

The soldiers were executed by armed Al shabaab militants while they were hiding and sheltering in a house belonging to nomadic Somali family near El Adde town, sources said.

Al-Shabaab said in a statement they also captured alive other Kenyan troops and seized weapons and military vehicles in the dawn attack on Friday that has been roundly condemned by the worldwide community.

However, both the Kenyan government and AMISOM officials have disputed the figure, terming it a propaganda.

The Swedes fought against US-funded African Union forces in Somalia, prosecutors said. The armed group, which has ties with al-Qaida, opposes Kenyas military involvement in Somalia and describes Kenyan peacekeepers as invaders.

Reports indicate that during last week’s attack in El Adde, a suicide bomber drove the VBIED into the centre of the Kenyan camp and detonated a huge bomb with a fragmentation radius of 200 metres.

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.