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NAIROBI. -The funerals began yesterday of students killed in a university massacre of almost 150 people, as some parents still waited to receive the remains of their loved ones.
In Nairobi, hundreds of students gathered as the body of Angela Nyokabi Githakwa, known as Jojo, was taken amid tears and wails from the mortuary to her home village in Kiambu, about 20km to the north.
Friends and family sobbed around the white coffin, with a gold cross on top.
On Thursday, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta signed letters to the families of those killed, expressing his “condolences and that of the entire country”.
“I promise that as a nation, we shall never forget them, nor forgive those who took her life,” Kenyatta’s letter to one student read.
The massacre, Kenya’s deadliest attack since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, claimed the lives of 142 students, three police officers and three soldiers at the university in the north-eastern town of Garissa.
Kenyatta’s letter has been given to the families of 130 victims, with the remaining to be “signed after identification procedures are complete”, a statement from the president’s office said.
Dozens of people, however, are still waiting to collect the bodies of their relatives over a week since attack.
Jackson Kilimo waited with a sombre family group to collect three victims, who all came from Kenya’s Marakwet district, 380km northwest of Nairobi.
“We identified the bodies the day after the tragedy happened, but it took time because the government wanted to be 100 percent sure of the identities, and the post- mortem procedure takes time,” said Kilimo.
l When Fatma Ali said goodbye to her son in January, she expected to see him again three months later – not as a terrorist suspect but as a brilliant science student coming home for a break.
Little did she know that the next time she would see him would be when the 21-year-old was under arrest in Garissa. His crime: taking part in a terrorist attack that left 148 people dead.
Rashid Charles Mberesero did not see his father for 20 years and had been raised by a single mother since 1994, when his parents separated after endless family squabbles.
But as the Form Five student bid his mother goodbye to return to Bihawana High School in Dodoma, he had a big secret in his heart.
Deep inside, he was already a dangerous terrorist, though his mother saw only a good boy who passed his exams and joined Advanced Secondary School to study Physics, Chemistry and Biology.
Four months after the two bade each other farewell, bad news arrived from Kenya.
Rashid had been arrested for allegedly taking part in a terrorist attack in which 148 people, most of them students, were killed at Garissa University College.
Rashid’s mother was devastated and shocked.
She had hoped her son would become a doctor, an engineer or anything valuable, but now her hopes, are shattered.
“I still do not know the person who enticed my son to join Al-Shabaab and I have been saddened by the news that he has been arrested in Kenya,’’ she says.
According to Fatma, the family only realised that Rashid had been arrested through a television broadcast. – Daily Nation.
Online Reporter