Nairobi -Seven police officers and a civilian were killed when an armoured vehicle drove over a roadside bomb in southeastern Kenya, a week after 14 others died in similar attacks claimed by Shabaab Islamists, a police source said on Wednesday.
“It’s unfortunate, we lost all the seven officers who were in the vehicle,” a senior police officer in the coastal Lamu district near the Somali border, told AFP.
“All the bodies were found scattered in the thicket possibly thrown out on impact.”
A police report seen by AFP noted that “seven administration police officers and one civilian died” as a result of the explosion. It was not clear whether the civilian was in or near the vehicle at the time of the explosion.
Last week 14 officers were killed in three separate blasts involving roadside bombs in different regions of northeastern Kenya along the border with Somalia.
The Shabaab, a Somali-led jihadist group linked to Al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility for those attacks.
Inspector General Joseph Boinnet of the Kenyan police warned that more such attacks were likely during the holy month of Ramadan.
Since 2007, the Shabaab has fought to overthrow successive internationally-backed governments in Somalia but began attacking Kenya in 2011 after Nairobi ordered its troops into Somalia to fight the militants.
Kenyan soldiers are now part of a 22 000-member African Union mission fighting there.
In 2013, Shabaab gunmen raided a shopping mall in the capital Nairobi killing 67 people, and in 2015 a similar attack on a university in Garissa left 148 dead.
©AFP
