DHAKA: At least 70 Kenyan students were massacred on Thursday when Somalia’s Shebab Islamist group attacked a university, the interior minister said, in the deadliest attack since US embassy bombings in 1998.

‘We are mopping up the area,’ Interior Minster Joseph Nkaiserry told reporters, saying that four gunmen had been killed after Kenyan troops launched an assault on the final building where the insurgents had holed out for over 12 hours.

The Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab claimed responsibility for the pre-dawn attack, the same insurgents who carried out the Westgate shopping mall massacre in Nairobi in September 2013, when four gunmen slaughtered at least 67 people in a four-day bloodbath.

Soldiers told a journalist at the scene that they had heard screaming from inside the building, including shouts of ‘Allah hu Akbar’, or ‘God is the greatest’ in Arabic.

One suspected gunman was earlier arrested as he tried to flee the campus, said The Straits Times.

BDST: 2017 HRS, APR 02, 2015