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Al-Shabaab admit executing dozens along Kenya border
December 2, 2014, 7:11 pm

Red Cross staff walk past the bodies of dozens of executed quarry workers near the Somali border [Xinhua]

Red Cross staff walk past the bodies of dozens of executed quarry workers near the Somali border [Xinhua]


Kenyan authorities say that a “horrific” attack was carried out in the early hours of Tuesday morning when the extremist Al-Shabaab group based in Somalia crossed the border into a remote region in Kenya and executed at least 36 quarry workers.

Survivors said they were first divided into Christian and Muslim.

The Muslims were asked to prove their faith by reciting the shahadah – or declaration of Islamic faith, survivors told the Red Cross. Those who could not recite it were lined up with Christians and then executed by gunfire or beheaded.

A statement from an extremist cleric based in Somalia praised the “courage” of the Al-Shabaab fighters.

The attack came just over a week after the Islamist extremist group killed 28 people who were on a bus travelling from Mandera, a small town located along the border between Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.

Both attacks seem to indicate a strategy which began in 2013 and is devised by extremist clerics in Somalia.

In July, Al-Shabaab fighters carried out an attack near the Kenyan town of Mpeketoni and killed up to 20 people. A day earlier, the extremist group killed at least 48 people at a holiday resort in the same region.

As in the quarry attack, police reports indicated that the armed men killed people who could not correctly answer questions about Islam – a deadly game played with seized civilians that is reminiscent of the attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, which left at least 67 people dead last September.

Al-Shabaab has vowed to continue carrying attacks in Kenya for as long as Nairobi maintains a military presence in Somalia in cooperation with the army there, and as part of an African Union contingent.

In January, Kenyan fighter jets killed a number of Al-Shabaab fighters when they struck their camp in Garbarahey in Somalia’s western Gedo region, near the Kenyan border.