The death toll in an attack by gunmen on a Kenyan university campus has risen to 14, a police officer at the scene said on Thursday.
"I have counted 14 bodies being carried out of the campus by a Red Cross ambulance, and they include two of our officers who were also killed," said the policeman, who was at the university compound in the northeastern town of Garissa, near the border with Somalia.
"We are finding it difficult to access the compound because some of the attackers are on top of a building and are firing at us whenever we try to gain entry."
Somalia's Al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab militant group said their gunmen attacked a Kenyan university on Thursday in an ongoing assault in revenge for Nairobi's troops fighting in Somalia.
"Kenya is at war with Somalia.. our people are still there, they are fighting and their mission is to kill those who are against the Shebab," insurgent spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage told AFP by telephone.
Police and soldiers surrounded and sealed off Garissa University College and were attempting to flush out the gunmen, the head of Kenya's police force, Joseph Boinet, said in a statement.
A policeman at the scene said some students had been taken hostage. "We can't tell how many but they are many since the college was in session."
Kenyan police officers take positions outside the Garissa University College as an ambulance carrying the injured going to a hospital, (AP Photo)
No group claimed responsibility for the raid, which took place just before dawn.
Somali Islamist militant group al Shabaab, which has links to Al Qaeda, has in the past carried out attacks in Garissa, which lies around 200 kilometres from the Somali border, and in other parts of Kenya.
Most of the wounded had been hit by gunfire and four were in a critical condition, the country's National Disaster Operation Centre said on its Twitter feed. Four had been airlifted to Nairobi for treatment, it said.
"I can tell you that we have 49 casualties so far, all with bullet and (shrapnel) wounds. Four people are dead," said a doctor at Garissa hospital.
Students of the Garissa University College get out of a house where they seek refuge after fleeing from an attack by gunmen in Garissa. (AP Photo)
Grace Kai, a student at the neighbouring Garissa Teachers Training College, said there had been warnings that an attack could be imminent.
"Some strangers had been spotted in Garissa town and were suspected to be terrorists," she told Reuters.
"Then on Monday our college principal told us ...that strangers had been spotted in our college... On Tuesday we were released to go home, and our college closed, but the campus remained in session, and now they have been attacked."
Al Shabaab, which was responsible for an deadly attack in 2013 on the upscale Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, has declared it will punish Kenya for sending troops into Somalia alongside African Union peacekeepers to fight the group.
((With inputs from AFP and Reuters))
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