At least 10 people, including several police officers, have been killed when gunmen attacked a bus in northeast Kenya.<\/p>\n
The vehicle belonging to the Medina Bus Company was attacked of Friday on a lonely stretch of road in the Kotulo area as it travelled between the towns of Wajir and Mandera, close to the border with Somalia.<\/p>\n
“People, among them police officers, were brutally murdered,” President Uhuru Kenyatta’s office said in a statement\u00a0on Saturday.<\/p>\n
The Somalia-based al-Shabab armed group, which has also carried out a number of attacks in neighbouring Kenya, took responsibility for the assault, saying it had killed people that included “secret security agents and government employees”.<\/p>\n
Police said 10 people had been killed and that the attackers had specifically targeted non-Somalis after flagging down the bus. The area is mostly inhabited by ethnic Somali Kenyans.<\/p>\n
Seven police officers were killed in the attack, local media reported, while a security source gave the same figure to AFP news agency.<\/p>\n
Witnesses said the attackers had shot all the victims outside the bus at close range, but police and the government did not comment on those accounts.<\/p>\n
Al-Shabab has been fighting for more than a decade to overthrow successive internationally-backed Somali governments and has previously resorted to direct attacks on road vehicles.<\/p>\n
Although Somalia is slowly rebuilding after years of devastating conflict, it suffers regular bombings and assaults claimed by the group.<\/p>\n
Al-Shabab’s fighters were driven out of Mogadishu by government forces backed by 20,000 African Union peacekeepers in 2011.<\/p>\n
Kenya has often been targeted by al-Shabaab, who killed 67 people at Nairobi’s Westgate shopping centre in 2013 and nearly 150 students at Garissa University in 2015.<\/p>\n
Al-Shabab says its attacks are revenge for Kenyan troops stationed inside Somalia.<\/p>\n
In June, it took responsibility for a roadside bomb attack in Kenya’s Wajir county that killed at least eight police officers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At least 10 people, including several police officers, have been killed when gunmen attacked a bus in northeast Kenya. The vehicle belonging to the Medina Bus Company was attacked of Friday on a lonely stretch of road in the Kotulo area as it travelled between the towns of Wajir and Mandera, close to the border […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":12358,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1462,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-africa","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12357"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12359,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12357\/revisions\/12359"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}