Nairobi, 4 Apr - (ANA) - Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta is facing mounting criticism over his government’s failure to tackle a growing domestic terror amid fears that the death toll from an attack by jihadists may yet increase beyond the official figure of 147. Yesterday, survivors of the massacre at Garissa University College spoke of the cold calculation exhibited by al-Shabaab militants as they roamed through buildings, executing non-Muslims. The attack at an 800-strong campus, appeared to catch the government unawares, and locals have expressed anger at a policy of neglect that has made Kenya’s northern border areas virtual no-go zones. Despite a tightening in the past week of some Western travel advisories, including the UK’s, and intelligence that a Kenyan university was a possible terror target, Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery insisted the government had no prior knowledge of the attack. “This incident… is one of those incidents which can surprise any country,” he told reporters. In Nairobi, distraught relatives converged on the city’s main mortuary to identify loved ones, while others undertook the long journey to Garissa, mid-way between Nairobi and the Somali border, to search for the missing. The attack on the university is the worst terror incident on Kenyan soil since the 1998 al-Qaeda bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi. In a pre-dawn raid, five gunmen burst into the college, shooting students as they fled in terror and singling out non-Muslims for execution. The 15-hour siege ended with the gunmen detonating their suicide vests after they were surrounded. “There were bodies everywhere in execution lines, we saw people whose heads had been blown off, bullet wounds everywhere, it was a grisly mess,” Reuben Nyaora, an aid worker who helped the wounded, told Agence France Presse. Many students still remain unaccounted for, raising fears the eventual death toll could be much higher. President Kenyatta is under pressure to act decisively against al-Shabaab. Since taking office two years ago, he has failed to stem the growing violence by militants that has claimed more than 400 lives. Hundreds of miles of border with Somalia remains largely unpatrolled, and rampant corruption has allowed militants to slip across with ease. Analysts say a heavy-handed counterterrorism approach in marginalised Muslim communities, particularly on the coast, has driven many Kenyans into the embrace of Islamist militants. (ANA)

FA/ANA/4 April 2015-------------