| Follow us on:
|
![Red Cross staff walk past the bodies of dozens of executed quarry workers near the Somali border [Xinhua]](http://thebricspost.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/235999264_8-e1417547439110.jpg)
Red Cross staff walk past the bodies of dozens of executed quarry workers near the Somali border [Xinhua]
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.
