Kenya begins three days of national mourning for massacre victims

Kenya on Sunday began three days of national mourning for the 148 people, mostly students, massacred by Somalia’s Shebab militants at a university in Garissa.

Easter church services throughout the country included prayers for the victims of Thursday’s attack, with flags also at half mast.

Although President Uhuru Kenyatta has vowed to retaliate “in the severest way possible”, there have also been calls for national unity.

Kenyatta said people’s “justified anger” should not lead to “the victimisation of anyone” -- a clear reference to Kenya’s large Muslim and ethnic Somali minorities.

Authorities meanwhile announced that they had identified one of the four dead Shebab gunmen as an ethnic-Somali and Kenyan national who was a A-grade pupil and law graduate -- highlighting the Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab’s ability to recruit within Kenya.

Interior ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said it was “critical that parents whose children go missing or show tendencies of having been exposed to violent extremism report to authorities”.

The militants attacked the university at dawn, and lined up non-Muslim students for execution in what Kenyatta described as a “barbaric medieval slaughter”.

The massacre, Kenya’s deadliest attack since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, claimed the lives of 142 students, three police officers and three soldiers.