Kenya massacre: Garissa gunman Abdirahim Abdullahi a ‘brilliant upcoming lawyer’

AUTHORITIES in Kenya say they have identified one of the four dead al-Shabab gunmen who massacred nearly 150 people at Garissa University as an ethnic-Somali Kenyan national and law graduate. 

Interior ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka on Sunday named one of the attackers as Abdirahim Abdullahi, saying he was “a university of Nairobi law graduate and described by a person who knows him well as a brilliant upcoming lawyer.”

Terrible loss ... a man is overcome with grief after learning a relative was killed by Somalia's Shebab Islamists during the siege on the Garissa Campus University. 

 

The spokesman said Abdullahi’s father, a local official in the north-eastern county of Mandera, had “reported to the authorities that his son had gone missing and suspected the boy had gone to Somalia”.

Describing Abdullahi as a high-flying A-grade student, Mr Njoka said it was “critical that parents whose children go missing or show tendencies of having been exposed to violent extremism report to authorities.”

Spectators ... members of the public gather outside a hospital mortuary, waiting to view the bodies of the alleged attackers in Garissa. 

 

Somalia’s al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabab militants claimed responsibility for Thursday’s massacre at Garissa University, during which non-Muslim students were lined up and executed.

The massacre, which was the deadliest attack on Kenyan soil since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, claimed the lives of 142 students, three police officers and three soldiers.

Evacuation ... an injured man is assisted aboard a bus, taking surviving students to their respective home counties after Al-Shabab gunmen rampaged through a university in north-eastern Kenya. 

 

Although losing ground in Somalia, al-Shabab have stepped up attacks inside Kenya as well as its recruitment of Muslim youth in the country’s north-eastern and coastal regions.