Police work to control a crowd of onlookers at the scene of an explosion on May 16, 2014 on the outskirts of Nairobi's business district where twin explosions claimed at least 10 lives.
At least 10 people have been killed and over 70 others injured during twin bomb explosions in a busy market in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, officials say.
Police said a blast hit a
14-seater public minibus, known as matatu, while another bomb went off inside
the Gikomba Market just east of Nairobi’s busy central business district, the
National Disaster Operation Centre (NDOC) said Friday.
The two explosions were
caused by improvised explosive devices and “were detonated simultaneously,”
said Nairobi police chief Benson Kibue.
One suspect has been
arrested over the attack on the second-hand clothes market in the city.
A spokesman at the Kenyatta
National Hospital, Nairobi's main hospital, said at least 70 people have been
injured in the incident, many of them in serious condition.
“Many of the injured are
bleeding profusely. We need a lot of blood,” the spokesman, Simon Ithae, said
as the hospital issued an appeal for donors.
Nairobi and the port city
of Mombasa have been rocked by a series of explosions since September.
On April 13, four people,
including two police officers, were killed in a car bomb explosion outside a
police station in a poor neighborhood of Nairobi.
In September last year, an
attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi killed at least 67 people.
Somali fighters have
been blamed for the attacks.
Al-Shabab
fighters said the raid on the mall was in retaliation for Kenya’s military
presence in Somalia. The Kenyan forces along with troops from Uganda, Burundi,
Djibouti, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia are part of the African Union Mission in
Somalia (AMISOM).
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