The five suspects went on trial in January 2016 for their involvement in the deadly attack at Garissa University in northeastern Kenya which was claimed by Somalia’s Al-Qaeda-linked Shabaab insurgents. It was the east African nation’s deadliest attack since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi. Four gunmen involved in the massacre were killed, but five others were prosecuted for terrorism and conspiracy to commit an attack, with 22 witnesses testifying.
Magistrate Francis Andayi ruled on Tuesday that there was no evidence linking one of the men, Osman Abdi Dagane, a Kenyan citizen, to the attack. However, the others, Mohamed Ali Abdikar, Hassan Aden Hassan, Sahal Diriye and Rashid Charles Mberesero — a Tanzanian national — will present their defence.
Their next appearance is on February 13. Earlier this month, Andayi ruled that three suspects have a case to answer for their alleged involvement in an attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi in 2013 in which 67 people died. One man was acquitted.
Kenya has been the scene of various attacks attributed to terrorist elements. In 1980, the Jewish-owned Norfolk hotel was attacked by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In 1998, the US embassy in Nairobi was bombed, as was the Israeli-owned Paradise hotel in 2002. In 2013, the militant group Al-Shabaab killed 67 people at Nairobi’s Westgate Shopping Mall. There have been numerous other lesser attacks. This prompted the national police to put out a statement urging the public, transport operators, malls, hotels, places of worship and education, to “step up their level of alertness”.
In early 1975, the first bombs to strike independent Kenya exploded. In February, there were two blasts in central Nairobi, inside the Starlight nightclub and in a travel bureau near the Hilton hotel. The day after the second explosion, JM Kariuki revealed in Parliament that his car had been hit “by what seemed to be bullets”.[citation needed] There were rumours of a botched attempt on his life. They were followed by a more serious blast in a Nairobi bus on 1 March, which killed 30 people. Despite a massive public outcry and a police manhunt, no arrests were made. For several days thereafter, the city lived in fear, destabilized by numerous telephone bomb hoaxes…
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