GARISSA, Kenya (AP) – The militants who slaughtered 147 people in a Kenyan school appeared to have planned extensively, even targeting a site where Christians had gone to pray, a survivor said Friday.
Police on Friday were at the campus of Garissa University College, taking fingerprints from the bodies of the four assailants and of the students and security officials who died, for thorough identification purposes. The northeastern Kenyan town lacks the facilities to store all those bodies. In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, family members were lining up at a morgue where about 20 bodies had already been airlifted from Garissa.
One of the first things that the assailants did early Thursday, survivor Helen Titus said, was to head for a lecture hall where Christians were in early morning prayer.
“They investigated our area. They knew everything,” Helen Titus told The Associated Press at a hospital in Garissa where she was being treated for a bullet wound to the wrist. Titus, , a 21-year-old English literature student, said she covered her face and hair with the blood of classmates and lay still at one point during al-Shabab’s deadliest attack on Kenyan soil in hopes the Islamic extremist gunmen would think she was dead.
The gunmen also told students hiding in dormitories to come out, assuring them that they would not be killed, said Titus, who wore a patient’s gown as she sat on a bench in the hospital yard.