By Spy Uganda
A police reservist and two armed attackers have been killed in a gunfight in Kenya’s northeast Mandera County near the border with Somalia, according to country’s authorities .
Security official Jeremiah Kosoim said a young boy had also been injured on Sunday during the gunfight that erupted as fighters were trying to destroy a telecommunications tower in the area.
He did not give further details about the attackers, but Somalia-based rebel group al-Shabab has often targeted security forces and strategic sites, such as telecommunications masts, in the area.
The al-Qaeda-linked group has said it wants to put pressure on Kenyan authorities to withdraw its troops from Somalia, where they are part of an African Union-mandated peacekeeping force.
Al-Shabab, which has lost control of most major cities and towns in Somalia, is fighting to topple the UN-recognised federal government in Mogadishu and its fighters have launched several attacks in Kenya over the years.
The worst of them was the Westgate Shopping Mall attack in 2013 which left over 60 people dead and the brutal attack at Garissa University in which over 140 people died in 2015.
In March this year, a series of targeted killings of schoolteachers by a militia group in Kenya saw an exodus of staff and the closure of hundreds of schools across the north-east of the country.
Thousands of teachers left their posts following several suspected al-Shabaab attacks in the region.
Schools in rural areas near the Somali border were been badly hit. On 13 January, suspected members of the Somalia-based terrorist group al-Shabaab attacked the village of Kamuthe in Garissa County and killed three non-local teachers and destroyed a communication mast.
A few days earlier, a boarding school in another remote village in the Dadaab area of Garissa had been targeted by al-Shabaab attackers, according to the Kenyan police. They killed three students and a teacher.
