Kenya’s response to Thursday’s attack at Garissa University College was “adequate,” Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview on Monday.
A Kenyan police source has told CNN that the country’s rapid response team was delayed hours getting to the scene because they could not arrange transport, and was beaten to Garissa by Nairobi-based journalists.
“One cannot actually say that the response was slow,” Foreign Minister Mohamed told Amanpour. “Obviously when parents are grieving and the country is mourning, it’s always easy to fall back on things like that, but I can assure you that we took very quick action as soon as this was reported.”
“What is adequate,” Amanpour asked, “about a hundred and fifty people face down on the ground, many of them shot in the head execution style, and parents and students saying ‘we were waiting for several hours before anybody came to try to stop this.’?”
“You know, again Christiane, obviously hindsight is always twenty-twenty,” Mohamed said. “We did everything that we could do.”
“One person killed by a terrorist attack is one too many. One hundred forty seven is too many.”
The foreign minister praised the “inter-agency cooperation” of the response, saying it “was so much of a higher level than what we’ve seen before, and what we’ve seen even in other countries.”
“So we did our best with the resources that we had.”
She promised to “root out these terrorists from our country” and “to them where they are based — and as you know, they [al Shabab] are based in Somalia.”
It was revealed on Sunday that one of the terrorists involved in the attack was not a Somali, however, but the Kenyan son of a government official.
“Obviously we are as shocked as everybody else that one of the terrorists was a student that went to school here, and that he’s Kenyan.”
“We cannot predict, and you cannot predict who will be next.”
Source: CNN
