by Bogonko Bosire
NAIROBI - Somali militiamen armed with guns and crude weapons massacred 22 villagers, many of them women and children, in a pre-dawn raid in northeast Kenya on Tuesday in what is believed to be the deadliest single attack in the restive region, police said.
At least eight of the 40 attackers were later killed as Kenyan security forces repelled the rampaging group from the village of Elgolisha near the border town of Mandera, national police spokesman Jaspher Ombati told AFP.
The militiamen entered the village around 5:00 am (0200 GMT) raid and used firearms as well as garden implements to shoot, hack and slash their victims to death, police sources in the region said.
"They came with guns, machetes and clubs and killed mostly women and children," said a senior police officer in Kenya`s Northeastern Province said. "It was a very bad attack.
"In the morning the scene was strewn with dead bodies," the official told AFP.
At least three villagers were also wounded in the raid, they said.
Police identified the attackers as coming from the Murule clan of pastoralists and the victims as members of their rival Garre clan, some of whom have Kenyan nationality.
The two groups, both nomadic herdspeople of Somali origin, have a history of bad blood and have frequently clashed over water and pasture rights in the dustbowl border region.
Police said officers from General Service Unit -- a paramilitary wing of the national constabulary, had been deployed in the area around Mandera reinforce security and pursue the surviving attackers who fled by foot to the north.
"We are pursuing the militiamen using a police chopper northwards," Ombati said.
Elgolisha is only about two kilometers from Kenya`s border with Somalia which has been the site of frequent tit-for-tat raids between the Murule and Garre clans.
"This is part of a long-standing conflict between the two clans," the police officer in Northeastern Province said.
In January, as many as 30 people were killed, dozens more wounded and thousands displaced in attacks launched by the two clans over claims to the region`s scarce water and grass for their herds.
The two groups are supported by their families in Somalia, itself ravaged by years of clan fighting, according to Kenyan police officials who have dealt with the clashes in the past.
In addition bandits and freelance militiamen roam the Kenyan-Somali border, which has never been manned since 1991 when Somali strongman Mohammed Siad Barre was toppled, plunging the country into a lawless patchwork of fiefdoms governed by warlords.
Inter-clan clashes in the region are part of long-standings feud between Kenyan and Somali tribes that have frequently battled over access to resources as well as politics.
Efforts by Kenyan authorities to strike a lasting accord between the factions have been stymied by the absence of a functional administration in the failed Horn of Africa nation of about 10 million people.
03/15/2005 16:47 GMT