NAIROBI, Kenya — One of the gunmen who attacked the Kenyan university where nearly 150 students were massacred last week was the son of a government official — and once a promising student himself — who had recently broken off contact with his family and disappeared, the Kenyan authorities said Sunday.
The discovery was made after Kenyan police officers paraded the gunman’s naked, bullet-riddled body in the back of a pickup truck. It immediately rekindled fears that chaos in neighboring Somalia was not the only factor driving terrorist attacks in Kenya and that the problem here may be more homegrown.
Tremendous grief, pain, rising frustration and a palpable sense of dread were starting to seep across Kenya as a three-day period of mourning began and the students’ bodies slowly made their way back to towns and villages in nearly every corner of this country.
Accounts emerged Sunday that the police commandos who finally ended the siege of the university did not arrive until more than eight hours after the attack began because of logistical issues, raising questions about whether more young people could have been saved.
“Something has to change,” said an editorial in the Sunday Nation, a Kenyan newspaper. “Kenya must change from its Hakuna Matata posture” — “hakuna matata” is a common Swahili expression meaning “no problem” — “and realize that a war is afoot against a merciless enemy.”
Kenyan officials believe there were four gunmen who stormed Garissa University College on Thursday, moving from dorm to dorm, tricking students into coming out of their rooms and lying down in rows and then shooting them in the head. The Kenyan commandos, after waiting several hours to fly from Nairobi, the capital, to Garissa, a frontier town in eastern Kenya, cornered and killed all four gunmen, the authorities said.
One of the gunmen was identified as Abdirahim Abdullahi, approximately 25, the son of a local chief near the Somali border and considered by acquaintances to be exceptionally bright.
Students Describe Attack at Kenya School
April 2, 2015. Photo by Dai Kurokawa/European Pressphoto Agency.
Mr. Abdullahi graduated from the University of Nairobi and worked at a bank in Nairobi, but he abruptly quit in recent months to join the Shabab Islamist militant group in Somalia, Kenyan officials said.
The Shabab are considered one of the most violent offshoots of Al Qaeda and vowed this weekend to make Kenyan cities “run red with blood” as retribution against the Kenyan government for sending troops into Somalia to help restore order.
Kenyan officials are increasingly worried that the Shabab have succeeded in co-opting disaffected youth inside Kenya, especially Somali-Kenyans like Mr. Abdullahi.
Outside of Somalia, Kenya sends more fighters to the Shabab than does any other country. Analysts say that many young Kenyan men have drawn payments of up to $1,000 to cross the border and hit the battlefield.
But ever since the Kenyan military stormed into southern Somalia in 2011, ousting the Shabab from some of their last strongholds, some Kenyan fighters may have drifted back. The fear is that Kenya, which has struggled with ordinary crime for decades, is now home to a growing network of trained jihadists.
On Saturday, in a televised address to the nation, President Uhuru Kenyatta said, “The planners and financiers of this brutality are deeply embedded in our communities.”
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