NAIROBI — Two people were killed in a grenade attack on a church in a town in eastern Kenya, police said Sunday, amid a spate of violence that has raised concerns for the country’s key tourism industry.

The attackers threw a grenade at a house inside a compound of the East African Pentecostal Church in Garissa late Saturday, killing two people living inside, locals said. Up to four others were injured in the attack.

“They attacked people who reside in the church compound,” said a worshipper. “Two people died and the others have been taken to hospital.”

National police deputy spokesman Charles Owino confirmed that two people had been killed and said a partially exploded landmine found elsewhere in town had been taken away by anti-terrorism police.

Asked who was responsible for the attacks, Owino noted that Garissa is a predominantly Muslim town and that the target was a church.

“It could be (religious) rivalry. It could be Al Shebab sympathisers, you can’t rule it out. Anything is possible,” he told AFP.

Kenya in mid-October sent troops into neighbouring south Somalia to fight the Shebab Islamists it accuses of being behind a spate of kidnappings and cross-border attacks. The Shebab deny imvolvement.

Owino said attacks of this sort will not weaken Kenya’s resolve to wipe out the Shebab.

“We will solve the problem of Al Shebab once and for all. We will keep tracking them until we are able to hand over Somalia as a safer place to its law-abiding citizens,” he said.

Later Sunday in Mandera in the extreme northeast on the Somali border soldiers in a military vehicle narrowly escaped when a roadside bomb exploded as it passed by. “A remote-controlled explosive device was activated just after a military vehicle went by,” a local security official said, asking not to be named.

He said the vehicle was not damaged but a small boy at the side of the road was injured.

Mandera is some 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) north east of Nairobi and around 700 kilometres north of Garissa.

Garissa is around 70 kilometres from the Dadaab camp for refugees from Somalia’s civil war where a police truck escorting a UN convoy struck a landmine on Saturday. The device did not detonate.

“People are not venturing out to pray for the (Muslim feast of) Eid al-Adha as there are too many security personnel moving around,” a local journalist said, adding that security personnel have been searching the town for explosives for the past week.

Banditry is commonplace in the region but landmines are rare.

Dadaab, about 80 kilometres from the Somali border, was opened more than 20 years ago but its population has swollen to close to half a million refugees this year because of famine in Somalia.

The spate of attacks, including one on Swiss tourists on Friday, could deal a blow to Kenya’s tourism industry which has only just recovered from the impact of post-election violence in 2008.

Nairobi blames the Shebab for a recent spate of kidnappings of foreigners from areas of Kenya close to the Somali border.

In September gunmen seized British tourists Judith and David Tebbutt, both in their fifties, who were holidaying north of the idyllic Lamu archipelago.

David Tebbutt was shot dead while his wife was captured. She is believed to have been sold to pirates in central Somalia.

On October 1 gunmen snatched disabled French woman Marie Dedieu from her home on the Lamu archipelago. She later died in captivity, French officials said.

On October 13, two Spanish aid workers were seized by gunmen in broad daylight from the Dadaab refugee camp.

All four kidnappings have been linked to Shebab Islamists. Kenyan police have also blamed the Shebab for two grenade attacks — one on a bar and one at a bus stop — in the capital.

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AFP

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