Kenya Official's Son among Gunmen in Garissa Attack

Authorities in Kenya on Sunday identified one of the al-Shabab gunmen who massacred 148 people at a university as the son of a Kenyan government official.

An Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said that Abdirahim Abdullahi was among four suicide attackers killed during Thursday’s massacre at Garissa University College. The spokesman said the government official had earlier reported his son missing.

A Garissa-based official told Reuters the government was aware Abdullahi, a former University of Nairobi law student, had joined the militant group al Shabaab after graduating in 2013. “He was a very brilliant student. But then he got these crazy ideas,” the official told Reuters.

Meanwhile, Kenyan churches used armed guards to protect their congregations Sunday, as Easter services were dedicated to the 148 victims of Thursday’s massacre.

For the several hundred members of Garissa’s Christian minority, which is fearful following the attack by the al-Shabab militants, Sunday’s service was laden with emotion. The gunmen who attacked Garissa University College on Thursday singled out Christians for killing, though al-Shabab has a long record of killing Muslims over the years.

A woman sings during an Easter Sunday service in a church in Garissa, Kenya, April 5, 2015.A woman sings during an Easter Sunday service in a church in Garissa, Kenya, April 5, 2015.

“We just keep on praying that God can help us, to comfort us in this difficult time,” said Dominick Odhiambo, a worshipper who said he planned to abandon his job as a plumber in Garissa and leave for his hometown because he was afraid.

In Garissa, where masked gunmen in 2012 killed more than a dozen people in simultaneous gun and grenade raids on two churches, six soldiers guarded the town’s main Christian church and about 100 worshippers ahead of Sunday mass.

“Thank you for coming, so many of you,” Bishop Joseph Alessandro said to the congregation at Our Lady of Consolation Church. He said some of those who died in Thursday’s attack would have been at the service, and he read condolence messages from around the world.

“Nowhere is safe, but here at church you can be with God and console yourself,” said Meli Muasya at Garissa’s walled Catholic Church.

In Mombasa, “we are very concerned about the security of our churches and worshippers, especially this Easter period, and also because it is clear that these attackers are targeting Christians,” Willybard Lagho, a Mombasa-based Catholic priest and chairman of the Coast Interfaith Council of Clerics (CICC), told Reuters.

Lagho said churches in the Indian Ocean port city of Mombasa were hiring armed police and private security guards for mass on Easter Sunday. Christians make up 83 percent of Kenya’s 44 million population.

During a televised address Saturday, President Uhuru Kenyatta declared a three-day mourning period to begin Sunday, appealing to Kenyans to safeguard the nation’s “peace and stability.”

Kenyatta stressed his belief that “Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance.” He said “the radicalization that breeds terrorism” is conducted “in the full glare of day.”

Also Sunday, Kenya’s security chief defended the response by special forces to the attacks.

The French news agency AFP reported that it took at least seven hours for special forces to arrive at the scene of the massacre after flying from the capital, Nairobi, hours after other security personnel fought with the militants.

Some journalists who drove the same 365-kilometer distance are reported to have arrived before the special forces.

Several Kenyan newspapers on Sunday were strongly critical of the government’s response.

“This is negligence on a scale that borders on the criminal,” the Nation wrote in its editorial on Sunday, recalling how survivors said “the gunmen, who killed scores of students with obvious relish, took their time.”

Interior Minster Joseph Nkaissery has said the attack was “one of those incidents which can surprise any country,” while President Kenyatta paid his tribute to the three police and three soldiers killed, who paid “the ultimate price in their selfless service to Kenya.”

But newspapers on Sunday were deeply critical of the government response.

But Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed defended the response, telling AFP on Saturday that “fighting terrorism … is like being a goalkeeper. You have 100 saves, and nobody remembers them. They remember that one that went past you.”

“If you look at how we responded it was not bad at all, say, compared to Westgate,” Njoka told the Nation.

“It takes time to assess and make the decisions, escalating it from National Security Advisory Committee to the National Security Council and then to scramble the elite units, get them to the airport and fly them to Garissa which is a two hour flight. There were many moving parts,” he added.

Four masked militants from the Somali Islamist group stormed the university campus in Garissa on Thursday, seeking out Christian students to kill while sparing some Muslims.