Five terrorists are believed to have been killed when commandos stormed the business complex, bringing to an end a 12-hour siege.
Every government has a unique identication code on its weapons, and the guns recovered at 14 Riverside Drive bore the initials ‘SO’, usually used by the Somalia National Army (SNA).
The United Nations Security Council in November last year warned that military equipment purchased by the Somali Federal Government was being diverted to the armouries of rebel movements.
The arms, the UN continued, included many from a consignment received in mid-2017.
They are now believed to be in the possession of arms dealers in Mogadishu and Baidoa.
“Many such weapons were likely diverted piecemeal by unpaid members of the Somali security forces,” the UN cautioned.
The AK-47 ries found at the 14 Riverside Complex are believed to have been ferried into
the country by an unidentied woman, but Kenyan security agencies are yet to arrive at the
exact dates when that happened.
Detectives are using the guns’ proles and the identities of the attackers and their accomplices to establish whether there was a connection between Tuesday’s attack and another
one foiled in February last year, when police arrested six people in Merti, Isiolo County, and recovered a deadly arsenal.
But, even with the foiling of the attack last year, the UN security council, in a November 9, last year, report, warned that some Al-shabaab operatives who had escaped the police dragnet could be hiding in the country, plotting another episode of mayhem.
“While six individuals have been prosecuted in Kenya in connection with the operation, several known members of the plot escaped arrest, ” the UN the Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea report cautioned, pointing out that “the attacking team — which likely
comprised ve individuals, on the basis of the number of captured ries — may still be at large in Kenya”. The UN conrmed that two of the ve ries recovered in Merti had been imported by the
Federal Government of Somalia in 2013 following the partial lifting of an arms embargo effected under the Security Council’s resolution 2093.
Although investigations are yet to reveal if the weapons used in last week’s attack were also bought by the Somali Government during the cessation of the embargo, those who spoke to the Nation yesterday said the guns were indeed owned by the Federal Government.
“We are yet to know how the terrorists got them, but we believe they may have been seized from the police or army during one of Al-shabaab’s many attacks against Somali government security forces,
” an ocer attached to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said.
He said the DCI was working closely with Somali security forces and the International Criminal Police Organisation, Interpol, to get more details regarding the guns and how they moved into Kenya.