Kenyan police tightened security in the capital, Nairobi, on intelligence that suspected al-Shabaab militants are planning attacks on targets in the city including parliament, a spokesman for the legislature said.
“There is a letter from central police to parliament police that leaked warning that parliament is being targeted by al-Shabaab,” James Maina Macharia, a spokesman for the National Assembly, said by phone today. “One Senate official has been arrested in relation to that intelligence,” he said, without identifying the person.
The letter also referred to other targets including the University of Nairobi, two churches and an open-air market in Nairobi, Macharia said. Police spokeswoman Zipporah Mboroki said she didn’t have information on the matter when contacted by Bloomberg News.
Al-Shabaab, which is affiliated with al-Qaeda, said it carried out this month’s raid on a university at Garissa in eastern Kenya in which at least 147 people died. Most of the victims were students. The group, which has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks in Kenya over the past four years, says it’s retaliating over Kenya’s deployment of troops four years ago in Somalia, where the militants have been waging an insurgency against the government since 2006.
