Sunday, October 2, 2011

Somali Gunmen Abduct Elderly Tourist in Kenya

Somali gunmen staged another brazen attack inside Kenya on Saturday morning, snatching a French tourist from a beachside bungalow and escaping to Somalia three weeks after a similar assault.

Kenya’s tour operators are particularly concerned that these two attacks could be devastating to the country’s billion-dollar tourism industry, a pillar of the national economy. Kenyan security officials have already been building up forces on the Somali border, saying that the chaos from Somalia, which has not had a central government for more than 20 years, is increasingly seeping into Kenya.

Now some Kenyan officials want to get even more aggressive against Somali bandits.

“We need to destroy them,” Kenya’s tourism minister, Najib Balala, said Saturday. “If we have to go across and attack them, I think it’s high time we do that.”

According to witnesses, a speedboat carrying 9 or 10 heavily armed Somalis quietly slipped into the channel between Lamu and Manda islands around 3 a.m. Saturday. Lamu is fabled for its pristine beaches, centuries-old ruins and $1,000-a-night guesthouses, and it is one of the best known tourist destinations in East Africa. Manda Island is just across a narrow channel that is usually plied by sunburned windsurfers and classic wooden dhows rather than gunmen in speedboats. The islands are about 60 miles south of the Somali border.

Witnesses said the attackers may have been tipped off by local workers because they beached their speedboat right outside the bungalow of the tourist, an elderly French woman who uses a wheelchair and has been visiting Manda Island for years. The gunmen burst into the woman’s bungalow and apparently dragged her out of bed, witnesses said, and when local staff members tried to come to her rescue, the gunmen blasted a barrage of shots into the air. No one was believed to have been hurt.

The gunmen raced away in their speedboat with the woman but without her wheelchair, north toward Somalia. By Saturday afternoon, Kenyan naval forces caught up with the attackers just south of the Somali border, and the two sides were locked in a standoff at sea. But a few hours later, after a firefight on the ocean, the kidnappers’ boat apparently outran the Kenyans and made it to land.

George Saitoti, Kenya’s internal security minister, blamed the attack on the Shabab, the Islamist militants who have pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda and control much of southern Somalia, including many areas along the Kenyan border.

Mr. Saitoti said that Kenyan naval forces had wounded several attackers before they disappeared into Ras Kamboni, a thickly forested coastal area just north of the Kenyan border that for years has been a haven for Islamist militants.

The kidnapping on Saturday mirrored what happened in Kiwayu, Kenya, on Sept. 11, when a speedboat of Somali gunmen zoomed up in the middle of the night to a fancy resort just south of the Somali border, burst into a bungalow and attacked a British couple. The gunmen killed the husband, bundled up the wife, and speeded away. According to Western officials, a pirate gang is holding the woman hostage deep within Somalia and demanding a multi-million dollar ransom.

Over the past several years, Somali pirates have hijacked dozens of ships, ransoming back the crews for millions of dollars. But the prospect of Somali pirate gangs striking on land — and inside Kenya — is unnerving to many people across the region.

Tour operators in Lamu said that the Kenyan police, who are widely considered undisciplined and corrupt, will not be able to protect them. And hotel managers said Saturday that they were starting to get cancellations.

On Saturday, the French government urged its citizens to stay away from Lamu.

“This could be the end of us,” said one guesthouse manager, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. “We had been telling tourists don’t worry, Somalia is far away, but now it seems these guys have figured out it really isn’t.”

Source: The New York Times

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