Gunmen suspected of being fighters from Somalia’s al Shabaab militant group burst into a government official’s house in northeast Kenya and shot him dead late on Monday, police said.
The four attackers in military fatigues struck in Mandera county, a territory near Somalia’s border that has seen a string of al Shabaab raids in recent years.
“We suspect the attackers are militants since after the raid they escaped toward Somalia,” Edward Mwamburi, the head of the northeastern regional police force, told Reuters by phone.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack on the administrator of the county’s Omar Jillo area. But the militant group has said it will continue to attack Kenya until Nairobi pulls troops from an African Union peacekeeping force inside Somalia.
Al Shabaab, seeking to impose its brand of Islam in Somalia, blew up part of a hotel in Mandera in October, killing at least 12 people.
It also killed 148 students in Garissa University in April 2015, its biggest attack in Kenya in decades.
(Reporting by Humphrey Malalo; Writing by George Obulutsa; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
