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Suspected Shabaab Militants Shoot Dead Kenyan Govt. Official | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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Kenya Defense Forces in Nairobi in 2013. (AFP)


Gunmen from the suspected al-Shabaab militant group shot and killed a government official in northeast Kenya on Monday, announced the police.

It said that militants from the Somali group burst into the administrative chief’s house and shot him dead late on Monday.

The four attackers in military fatigues struck in Mandera county, a territory near Somalia’s border that has seen a string of al-Shabaab raids in recent years.

“We suspect the attackers are militants since after the raid they escaped toward Somalia,” Edward Mwamburi, the head of the northeastern regional police force, told Reuters by phone.

Two Kenya police reservists have gone missing after the attack.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack on the administrator of the county’s Omar Jillo area. But the militant group has said it will continue to attack Kenya until Nairobi pulls troops from an African Union peacekeeping force inside Somalia.

Omar Jillo is among towns in the area under dusk to dawn curfew over insecurity caused by the al-Qaeda linked al-Shabab militants. The other towns are Mandera, Arabia, Fino, Lafey Kotulo and Elwak.

Al-Shabaab blew up part of a hotel in Mandera in October, killing at least 12 people.

It also killed 148 students in Garissa University in April 2015, its biggest attack in Kenya in decades.