NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — A donkey cart carrying a suspected improvised bomb blew up at a checkpoint on the Kenya-Somalia border Thursday, killing one Kenyan police officer and critically wounding four others, authorities said.
The rider jumped off and ran back into Somalia moments before the cart exploded, causing a huge fire at the border post in the northern county of Mandera, the report said.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion immediately fell on al-Shabab, a Somalia-based extremist group linked to al-Qaida.
The group had staged a string of kidnappings of Westerners inside Kenya that threatened the country’s tourism; a key pillar of its economy.
The Kenyan forces became part of the African Union peacekeeping mission that has bolstered Somalia’s weak government for more than 20 years against an al-Shabab insurgency.
The AU mission last year began a drawdown of it troops under a U.N. Security Council resolution to return control to the Somali government.
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