The 20-year-old student called home from the university besieged by Islamic militants and frantically told her father, “There are gunshots everywhere! Tell Mum to pray for me — I don’t know if I will survive.”
The call by Elizabeth Namarome Musinai at dawn Thursday was one of several her family received as the attack and hostage drama unfolded at Garissa University College, where gunmen from the al-Shabab militant group killed 148 people.
Then, about 1 p.m., a man got on the line to demand that Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta be contacted within two minutes and told to remove troops from neighboring Somalia, where they are fighting al-Shabab extremists.
He phoned back promptly. When told the president had not been contacted, he said, “I am going to kill your daughter.” Three gunshots followed, and he hung up. When Elizabeth’s father, Fred Kaskon Musinai, called the man back, he said he was told: “She is now with her God.”
Survivors and relatives gave similarly harrowing accounts of the siege by Islamic extremists as Kenya on Friday mourned the victims of the attack, the deadliest since the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi that killed more than 200 people.
At the Nairobi morgue, screaming and crying family members were assisted by Red Cross staffers, who tried to console them.
Archbishop John Njue, who conducted Good Friday services in the capital, cited the slain students and said, “This is a tremendous challenge in our country.”
Pope Francis condemned the attack as an act of “senseless brutality” and called for those responsible to change their violent ways.
The gunmen singled out Christians at the university, killing them on the spot. But Muslims also were among the dead, as were women, even though the attackers had said at one point that they would be spared.
The masked attackers battled troops and police before the violence ended after about 13 hours.
In announcing an updated figure of 148 people killed by the gunmen, Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery said 142 of the dead were students, three were policemen and three were soldiers.
Police worked at the Garissa campus Friday, taking fingerprints from the bodies of the four slain gunmen and of the students and security officials who died, for identification purposes.
A spokesman for al-Shabab, Ali Mohamud Rage, said it was responsible for the attack. Al-Shabab has struck several times in Kenya, including the siege at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in 2013 that killed 67 people, to retaliate against Kenya for sending troops to Somalia in 2011 to fight the militants and stabilize the government in Mogadishu.
The U.N. Security Council expressed outrage — a word it rarely uses — in condemning the attack, and the White House said President Barack Obama called Kenyatta to express condolences “for the lives lost during the heinous terrorist attack.”
Obama, who is scheduled to visit Nairobi in July, “emphasized his support for the government and people of Kenya,” according to a statement. It added that he and Kenyatta would discuss how to strengthen counterterrorism cooperation.
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