Pope Francis has condemned an assault by Somali militants on a Kenyan university that killed at least 147 people, calling it an act of “senseless brutality“.
Masked al-Shabaab gunmen stormed the Garissa University College campus on Thursday and initially killed indiscriminately before freeing some Muslims and targeting Christian students.
“In union with all people of good will throughout the world, His Holiness condemns this act of senseless brutality and prays for a change of heart among its perpetrators,“ Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin said in a statement.
Parolin said the pontiff called upon "all those in authority to redouble their efforts to work with all men and women in Kenya to bring an end to such violence".
Pope Francis has expressed alarm over the plight of Christians targeted for their faith, particularly by Islamic State in the Middle East, and has said the international community would be justified in using military force as a last resort to stop “unjust aggression“.
The Garissa attack is the worst terrorist attack since the 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in the country.
The militants appeared to have planned extensively, even targeting a site where Christians had gone to pray, a survivor has said.
Police have taken fingerprints from the bodies of the four assailants and of the students and security officials who died, for identification purposes.
The north-eastern Kenyan town lacks the facilities to store all the bodies.
In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, family members were lining up at a morgue where about 20 bodies had already been airlifted from Garissa.
One of the first things that the assailants did early on Thursday, survivor Helen Titus said, was to head for a lecture hall where Christians were in early-morning prayer.
“They investigated our area. They knew everything,” Ms Titus told reporters at a hospital in Garissa where she was being treated for a bullet wound to the wrist.
Ms Titus, a 21-year-old English literature student, said she covered her face and hair with the blood of classmates, and lay still at one point during al-Shabab’s deadliest attack on Kenyan soil in hopes the Islamic extremist gunmen would think she was dead.
The gunmen also told students hiding in dormitories to come out, assuring them that they would not be killed, said Ms Titus, who wore a patient’s gown as she sat on a bench in the hospital yard.
“We just wondered whether to come out or not,” she said.
Many students did, whereupon the gunmen started shooting men, saying they would not kill “ladies”, Titus said.
But they also shot women and targeted Christians, said Ms Titus, who is a Christian.
A small group of male demonstrators walked down a main road in Garissa today with signs that read “We are against the killing of innocent Kenyans!!!! We are tired!!” and “Enough is enough. No more killing!! We are with you, our fellow Kenyans”.
“We feel very sorry for them and we condemn the attack,” said protester Abdullahi Muktar.
Elsewhere in Garissa, there was activity in a military-controlled area where medical vehicles and a UNHCR truck made their way in and out, and some civilians, possibly relatives of the dead, gathered.
Security was tight at the gate. A Garissa University College bus was parked outside.
At one point, a group approached the gate and was blocked by soldiers.
Several women began shrieking and collapsed in apparent grief in the dust for several minutes. A bystander said the son of one of the women had died in the attack.
The masked attackers – strapped with explosives and armed with AK-47s – singled out non-Muslim students at Garissa University College and then gunned them down without mercy, survivors said.
The gunmen took dozens of hostages in a dormitory as they battled troops and police before the operation ended after about 13 hours, witnesses said.
Al-Shabab spokesman Ali Mohamud Rage said fighters from the Somalia-based extremist group were responsible.
The al-Qaida-linked group has been blamed for a series of attacks in Kenya, including the siege at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in 2013 that killed 67 people, as well as other violence in the north.
The group has vowed to retaliate against Kenya for sending troops to Somalia in 2011 to fight the militants staging cross-border attacks and kidnappings.
PA