A raid by hundreds of Ethiopian bandits on a remote village in northern Kenya, and reprisals by tribesmen and Kenyan security forces, left at least 71 people dead, including more than two dozen children, police said.
Armed with guns and spears, the bandits attacked villagers in Turbi, a remote area of Kenya about 560km northeast of the capital, Nairobi, on Tuesday killing 45 civilians and stealing thousands of farm animals, police spokesman Jaspher Ombati said Wednesday.
The Roman Catholic Information Service said at least 52 villagers were killed.
The assailants hacked to death and slashed the throats of at least two dozen children at a boarding school in the village, while most of the adults were shot, said medical workers at Wilson Airport, where 10 critically injured victims were being flown to Nairobi for treatment.
The attackers lingered the entire day in the village, shooting and hacking anyone on sight because security forces were slow to respond, according to the Catholic Information Service. Wounded survivors wept or held their heads in anguish as they were carried out of an air ambulance.
"They shot me on this arm and the right thigh," Bati Duba, 33, said while lifting her right arm to show a bullet hole, with visible tendons.
Kenyan security forces pursued the bandits, who numbered between 300 and 500, and killed 16 of them, the deputy Eastern Province police chief, Gerald Oluoch, said in a police report seen by the Associated Press. The security forces also recovered 5,000 sheep and 200 cattle.
In an apparent reprisal, men believed to be from the Gabra tribe killed 10 members of the rival Borana tribe Wednesday as they were being driven to a seminar in Marsabit, 400km northeast of Nairobi, Ombati said.
Reverend Aldrin Anito, an Italian priest, was driving them when he found the road blocked by stones, Ombati said.
The men at the roadblock asked Anito what tribe the passengers belonged to. On hearing they were Boranas, the attackers killed the 10 passengers -- two men, four women and four children -- with crude weapons, Ombati said in a statement. The priest was unhurt.
Members of the rival Borana and Gabra clans, which have long-running disputes over water and pasture in the semi-arid area near the Ethiopian border, continued to clash following Tuesday's attack, officials said.
"Gabra people coming from Sololo say that somebody was killed, there are reports of further attacks in Moyale," said Bonaya Godana, a member of parliament who represents the district where the violence is occurring.
Sololo is a predominantly Borana town about 30km north of Turbi and Moyale is about 45km east of Sololo on the Ethiopian border.
Godana, a former Kenyan foreign minister, spoke to reporters on the second day of a visit to Turbi where between 300 and 500 heavily armed Borana raiders killed 56 Gabra villagers, including 22 children, on Tuesday.
At least 10 of the attackers were killed during and after the raid that was followed by a revenge attack by a group of Gabras who killed 10 Boranas, including four children, after pulling them from a car driven by a priest near Sololo.
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