GARISSA, Kenya — 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.”
Musinai said he is hanging on to hope that Elizabeth survived, although she is not on the list of wounded, which numbers 104. He has traveled from his home in Kitale to Nairobi, where the dead are being brought to a morgue.
Archbishop John Njue, who conducted Good Friday services in the capital, cited the “murdered” students and said, “This is a tremendous challenge in our country.” Pope Francis condemned the attack as an act of “senseless brutality.”
The gunmen singled out Christians. Muslims also were among the dead, as were women, even though the attackers had said at one point that they, too, would be spared.
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 police officers and three were soldiers. Police worked at the Garissa campus Friday, taking fingerprints from the bodies.
