Garissa University attack: Kenya seeks more Western help to prevent further massacres

Kenya needs more help from its US and European allies with intelligence and security measures to help prevent further massacres by Somali militants, Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed said on 7 April.

The murder of 148 people at Garissa University College last week has piled pressure on President Uhuru Kenyatta to stop frequent gun and grenade assaults staged on Kenyan soil by the Al-Shabaab group, which is aligned to al-Qaeda.

Mohamed said Kenya, a staunch Western ally in the fight against radical Islam in east Africa, already receives intelligence support but was seeking additional help in the area of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).

"We've been receiving support, like I said before, we've been co-operating. There is equipment that has been provided, capacity building, intelligence sharing, information sharing, all that has been happening and now we are looking at what else we may need and one of the areas was improved ISR, to improve capacity, to improve surveillance, to improve intelligence gathering, equipment and capacity, so we are looking on all that and trying to see where the gaps are.

"We are carrying out a gap analysis to see where we need additional support and there are going to be many areas where we need additional support and we hope that we can actually continue relying on this support of our strongest allies," she said in an interview.

In 2013, the United States sent FBI investigators to help Kenyans with investigations into an Al-Shabaab raid on Nairobi's Westgate shopping mall, in which 67 people were killed during a four-hour siege.

Kenya has struggled to stem the flow of Al-Shabaab fighters and weapons across its 700km border with Somalia, and the recent bloodshed has damaged the economy by scaring away tourists and investors.

Mohamed said Kenya was looking at ways it can put up more border posts and improve surveillance along the frontier, an area where foreign allies may be able to help.

One of the four gunmen in the Garissa raid was an ethnic Somali whose father is a Kenyan government official, intensifying fears about the threat from home-grown militants.

Mohamed said Kenya plans to compile a list of radicalised young men in the next few weeks to determine the scale of the problem within its Muslim community, who make up about 10% of Kenya's 44 million people.

"As a government, the idea is for us to try and account for those who are not here, find out where they are, see whether we can encourage them to come back and help them get deradicalised, maybe even set up centres where we can take them so that they can actually be taught the true worth of Muslim faith, taught... Islam in the way that most of us were taught it," she said.

The Garissa assault has strained historically cordial relations between Kenya's Christian and Muslim communities, which have deteriorated in recent years following Islamist attacks on churches and Christian priests.

Mohamed said Muslim leaders have heeded Kenyatta's call for the community to do more to combat radicalisation and had put forward proposals to do that, including the vetting of Islamic teachers and how to deal with Muslim institutions.