NAIROBI, Kenya — One gunman shot from the right and one from the left, each killing the non-Muslims lying in a line on the ground, growing closer and closer to Douglas Ochwodho, who was in the middle.
Then the shooting stopped. Apparently each gunman thought the other had shot Ochwodho. He lay perfectly still until the 20 Islamic extremists left, and he appears to be the only survivor of those who had been selected for death.
Somalia’s Islamic extremist rebels, al-Shabab, attacked a bus in northern Kenya at dawn Saturday, singling out and killing 28 passengers who could not recite an Islamic creed and were assumed to be non-Muslims, Kenyan police said.
Those who could not say the Shahada, a tenet of the Muslim faith, were shot at close range, Ochwodho said.
Nineteen men and nine women died in the bus attack, said Kenyan Police Chief David Kimaiyo.
Al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the killings through its radio station in Somalia, saying it was in retaliation for raids by Kenyan security forces carried out last week on four mosques at the Kenyan coast.
Kenya’s military said it responded to the killings with airstrikes later Saturday that destroyed the attackers’ camp in Somalia and killed 45 rebels.
The bus, which was traveling to the capital Nairobi with 60 passengers, was hijacked 31 miles from the town of Mandera, near Kenya’s border with Somalia, said two police officers who insisted on anonymity because they were ordered not to speak to the news media.
The attackers first tried to wave the bus down, but it didn’t stop, so the gunmen sprayed it with bullets, said the police. When that didn’t work, they shot a rocket-propelled grenade at it, the officers said.
The gunmen took control of the vehicle and forced it off the road, where they ordered all the passengers out of the vehicle and separated those who appeared to be non-Muslims — mostly non-Somalis — from the rest.
Ochwodho told AP that the non-Somali passengers were asked to recite the Shahada, an Islamic creed declaring oneness with God. Those who couldn’t recite the creed were ordered to lie down and then were shot.
