Kenya: Five civilians killed by armed assailants, some beheaded

Nairobi [Kenya], June 26 : Armed assailants who attacked two villages in southeast Kenya have killed five civilians, police said, reported Al Jazeera on Sunday.

The attack on Sunday took place in the villages of Juhudi and Salama in Lamu County, which borders Somalia, the police source said.

The attackers also set ablaze some houses and destroyed property.

Police said, "A 60-year-old man was bound with a rope and his throat slit, his house burnt with all belonging. Three others were killed in a similar manner while a fifth victim was shot."

"Women were locked in the houses and the men ordered out, where they were tied with ropes and butchered," said a resident Hassan Abdul said, as per Al Jazeera.

Abdul stated that among the five deceased was a student from a secondary school and that "all those killed were slashed and some of them had been beheaded."

Ismail Hussein, another local resident, claimed that the fighters grabbed food supplies before fleeing while shooting their weapons into the air.

The incident was labelled a "terrorist attack" by the police, a term they frequently use to describe incursions by the al-Shabab militant group in Somalia.

Al-Shabab rebels routinely launch attacks in Lamu, which is close to Kenya's border with Somalia, in an effort to persuade Kenya to pull its troops out of Somalia, where they are part of an international peacekeeping mission defending the central government, as per Al Jazeera.

Kenya dispatched its first soldiers to Somalia in 2011 to fight al-Qaeda-affiliated groups and is now a major contributor of troops to an African Union (AU) military operation against the group.

The Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, was the scene of a brutal siege in 2013 that took 67 lives, and 148 persons were killed in a massacre that occurred at Garissa University in 2015.

Al-Shabab has continued its deadly attacks inside of Somalia despite a massive offensive that pro-government forces launched last August with support from the AU Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS).

Since 2022, when ATMIS superseded the AU Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), it has been aiding the federal government of Somalia in its fight against al-Shabab. ATMIS has 22,000 personnel.

Four individuals were killed last week in northeast Kenya, according to authorities, who blamed al-Shabab. The incident happened when a car was escorting a queue of buses between the towns of Banisa and Mandera. According to the police it was attacked wBanisa's second security crew responded.

Eight Kenyan police officers were killed when their vehicle was destroyed by an improvised explosive device in a suspected attack by al-Shabab on June 14, police said.

In the last two weeks, attacks linked to al-Shabab have killed another 10 people, according to police reports, Al Jazeera reported.