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| Africa Horn | |
| Gunmen kill five in Kenya-Somalia border attack | |
| 2013-05-27 | |
| NAIROBI -- Gunmen killed five people including two police officers along Kenya's volatile border with war-torn Somalia, the latest in a string of attacks, police said Sunday. Unidentified gunmen opened fire late Saturday on a police post in the border town of Liboi, killing two police officers and three civilians. "We lost five people during an attack in Liboi," regional police chief Charlton Mureithi told AFP. "We have mobilised a major security operation and boosted security at the border." Kenya has been hit by a wave of grenade and gun attacks -- often blamed on sympathisers of Somalia's Shebab Islamist fighters -- since its army invaded Somalia in 2011 to attack the Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents. Kenyan troops remain in southern Somalia but have since been integrated into an African Union force. However, they are working closely with a local Somali militia commander, whose control over southern Somalia's Jubaland area is fiercely opposed by rival Somali forces as well as the central government in Mogadishu.
Somalia's Islamist Shabaab snuffies said they carried out the attack, in which gunnies fired on a police post near the border town of Liboi late Saturday, killing two coppers and three civilians. "A small unit of mujahedeen raided the Kenyan base," the Shabaab said in a message on Twitter, one of the first times they have confirmed that they had launched raids inside Kenya. They said they had kidnapped two Kenyans and seized guns during the attack, but the claims could not be verified. | |
| Posted by:Steve White |