Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta yesterday said that militants who stormed an upmarket hotel complex, killing 14 people, had been “eliminated” after an almost 20-hour siege in which hundreds of civilians were rescued.
At least one suicide bomber blew himself up and gunmen engaged security forces in numerous shoot-outs during the assault on the DusitD2 compound, which includes a hotel, spa, restaurant and office buildings.
The attack was claimed by the al-Qaeda-linked Somalian group al-Shabaab, which has repeatedly targeted Kenya since it sent its army into Somalia in October 2011 to fight the group.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The sight of armed militants and civilians fleeing reminded Kenyans of a 2013 al-Shabaab attack on the Westgate mall, which left 67 dead in a siege that lasted four days and led to sharp criticism of the security response.
In a televised address, Kenyatta said that about 700 civilians had been evacuated throughout the attack at DusitD2, with the swift and effective work from security forces drawing widespread praise in local media.
“I can confirm that ... the security operation at Dusit complex is over and all the terrorists eliminated,” Kenyatta said. “As of this moment, we have confirmation that 14 innocent lives were lost to the ... terrorists, with others injured.”
It was not immediately clear how many attackers there were in total.
CCTV footage broadcast on local media showed four black-clad, heavily armed men entering the complex on Tuesday afternoon.
At least one of them blew himself up at the start of the attack.
Two attackers were shot dead yesterday morning after a prolonged shoot-out, a police source said.
The attack began at about 3pm on Tuesday, with a loud blast followed by gunfire and rapid calls for help spreading on Twitter.
Kenyan Police Chief Joseph Boinnet said that the attack began with an explosion targeting three cars in the parking lot and a suicide bombing in the foyer of the Dusit hotel.
Among the dead was a US citizen, a US Department of State official said.
A mortuary official said there were also 11 Kenyan victims, a British victim, one with no papers and an unidentified torso of a male adult.
It was a tormented night for families of those trapped as they waited outside the hotel, with sporadic gunfire ringing out, and the rescue of dozens of people at about 3:30am.
Explosions and gunfire intensified from dawn until police managed to secure the complex mid-morning.
An editorial in the Daily Nation newspaper said that the attack was a stark reminder that Kenya’s security challenges are far from over.
The last major attack in the country was in 2015, when al-Shabaab killed 148 people at a university in Garissa.
Since then, sporadic attacks have targeted security forces mostly in the remote northeastern parts of the country.
“Just when we thought that things were calm, the gangs unleashed mayhem. For Kenyans, the chilling reality is that the attacks are not ceasing,” the editorial said.
In its statement, al-Shabaab said that the attack came exactly three years after its fighters overran a Kenyan military base in Somalia, killing about 200 soldiers.
The government has refused to give a toll or disclose details about the attack.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the