DHAKA: Kenya has urged the United Nations to remove a camp housing more than half a million Somali refugees within three months.

The country made the urge as part of a response to the recent killing of 148 people by Somali gunmen at a Kenyan university, reports the Aljazeera.

Kenya has in the past accused fighters of hiding out in Dadaab camp which it now wants the UN refugee agency UNHCR to move across the border to inside Somalia.

“We have asked the UNHCR to relocate the refugees in three months, failure to which we shall relocate them ourselves,” Deputy President William Ruto said in a statement on Saturday.

“The way America changed after 9/11 is the way Kenya will change after Garissa,” he said, referring to the university that was attacked on April 2.

The complex of camps hosts more than 600,000 Somali refugees, according to Ruto, in a remote, dry corner in northeast Kenya, about an hour's drive from Garissa town.

BDST: 1115 HRS, APR 12, 2015
BD/