Kenyan police confirmed Sunday they discovered three Al-Shabaab militants’ bodies in a thicket after a foiled attack on a police camp in Wajir county in northeast region on Thursday.
Wajir County Police Commander Stephen Ngetich said the three bodies were discovered after the militants had attempted to attack an Administration Police Special Forces Camp in Kutulo on Thursday evening, resulting into two-hour gun battle that ended with the assailants retreating in the thicket.
“Three of them were killed. We are still near the border patrolling to see if there are more,” Ngetich said.
The force is a combination of elite officers drawn from the Administration Police, mainly the Rapid Deployment Unit and the Rural Border Patrol unit.
The police believe that militants who have staged several attacks in the northeast region in the recent past seem to have moved from Mandera area to Wajir where there have been persistent attacks in the recent months.
They have been targeting communication masts destroying them in a series in Wajir. So far five have been attacked in less than a month. Officials attribute the fall of incidents in Mandera to the construction of a security wall in parts of the county.
The wall is manned by the Kenya Defence Forces soldiers who are already on the ground in Mandera County. A surveillance road is also being built, running parallel with the barrier, for easier monitoring of the border.
Kenya began constructing a security wall which runs to the coastal town of Lamu in April 2015 to help prevent Somali militants from crossing into Kenya to carry out terror attacks.
Since Kenyan soldiers crossed into Somalia, several attacks believed to have been carried out by Al-Shabaab have occurred in Mandera, Wajir, and Garissa and Dadaab districts of northern Kenya even as the military reports gains against the Islamist group by capturing their military bases and killing scores of them.
