Police face backlash over Kenya college attack
GARISSA, Kenya -- A leading Kenyan newspaper reports that police waited for seven hours before sending a special tactical unit into Garissa college to fight the extremist gunmen who killed 148 people on Thursday.
Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper said Sunday that when the specially-trained police unit finally went into the college campus it took them only 30 minutes to kill the four al-Shabaab gunmen and stop the siege.
The newspaper's front page article questioned why the Interior Minister and police chief were flown to Garissa from Nairobi before the tactical team.
CBS News correspondent Debora Patta reported that Kenyan security forces were posted outside many churches in the country as Easter Sunday services commenced, but the additional security came too late for the families grieving the loss of their loved ones in the Garissa attack.
Dozens of parents filed through the Chiromo mortuary in Nairobi on Saturday to identify their slain sons and daughters, whose bodies were brought to the capital after the attack. For many of them, Patta said grief was turning to anger over the response.
"Somebody in the government failed," one woman who lost her nephew in the attack told Patta. "The people in charge of security should be able to tell us as parents what went wrong."
Kenyan Foreign Affairs Minister Amina Mohamed told Patta she was angry over the attack, but would not say which government agencies or officials should be held responsible for the slow response, if any.
"We need some understanding. We need some sensitivity," she said. "So you allow us to hurt, you allow us to mourn, let's bury our dead, let's treat our injured. This discussion can be for another day."
Earlier Sunday, the son of a Kenyan government official has been identified as one of the gunmen who attacked the college, authorities said Sunday.
Abdirahim Mohammed Abdullahi, one of the Islamic extremists who attacked Garissa University College, was the son of a government chief in Mandera County, Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka told The Associated Press.
The chief had reported his son missing last year and said he feared that he had gone to Somalia, said Njoka. All four attackers were killed by Kenyan security forces on Thursday, said police.
Abdullahi graduated from the University of Nairobi with a law degree in 2013 and was viewed as a "brilliant upcoming lawyer," according to someone who knew him. It is not clear where he worked before he disappeared last year, Njoka said.