Monday, July 14, 2014
NAIROBI (Xinhua) -- The Kenyan police said Sunday they have arrested five key suspects behind a spate of insecurity which has rocked the northern Kenya, particularly Garissa town, scarred by previous terrorist attacks.
Detectives have also released identities of the serial killers who have claimed five lives within two months.
Regional Criminal Investigation Department commander Musa Yego told Xinhua that the police are interrogating three Ethiopians and two Kenyans in the last two days with regards to bomb and grenade attacks in Garissa town.
"We are happy that we have made a breakthrough to unravel unexplained killings that have thrown our town into security scare in the last two months," Yego said.
"Among those arrested are three Ethiopian suspected to be from the Somali region (Ethiopia), while two others were Kenyans, a taxi driver and a landlord," he added.
Yego said the taxi driver was helping to transport the killers to their destination during their killing spree in the town, while the landlord had been giving accommodation to the foreign criminals by renting his houses to them without informing the security agencies of their illegal presence in the country.
The investigators are being helped with investigation by one of the assailants, who was arrested last Wednesday by members of the public shortly after killing a prominent businessman along Gulled hotel area.
Yego said the police have recovered some vital documents, including an Ethiopian passport and communication tracks, that indicates there are teams of people believed to be security officials from the Somali region of Ethiopia sneaking into the country through Moyale and Mandera border points on a mission to kill people they suspect to have associations with a rebel group back at home and cause tribal clashes in the county.
"The passport carried by the suspected killer who was arrested in Garissa briefly after killing a businessman indicates he entered the country through Moyale border before heading to Nairobi, where we believe he met some people, before traveling to Garissa to cause a felony," he noted.
Yego urged the residents in northeast region to be on the look out and avoid embracing people from other countries and giving them accommodation without first establishing their motive in the country.
Two of the assassins, Khalif Hassan, 38, and Abdirahman Abdi, 40, who are the team leaders are among those in custody at Garissa police station now.
While speaking to Xinhua on phone from London, the Oromo National Liberation Front (ONLF) foreign secretary Abdirahman Sheikh Mahdi blamed the attacks in Garissa on Ethiopian intelligence officers of changing their tactics to fight them by carrying out criminal activities inside friendly country to discredit them.
"They want to carry out killings inside Kenya and in turn blame on us so that Kenya, which has been hosting hundreds of thousands of our refugees and asylum seekers, can turn hostile against our people," he said.
Source: Xinhua