Pressure Mounts on Kenya's President After University Massacre

Political pressure mounted on Kenya's president on Wednesday with scathing editorials and growing anger at a seven-hour delay in the deployment of a special forces unit that eventually ended the bloody siege at Garissa University last week.

The al-Qaida-aligned al-Shabab group has now killed more than 400 people in Kenya since President Uhuru Kenyatta took office in April 2013, denting the east African nation's image abroad and severely damaging its vital tourism industry.

The pre-dawn attack on the college, 200 km (120 miles) from the Somali border, came a day after Kenyatta berated Britain and Australia for issuing travel advisories, saying their security warnings were "not genuine."

However, Kenyan media, some of them owned by Kenyatta's family, are becoming increasingly critical of the president and government efforts to stop future attacks, drawing comparisons to al-Shabab's assault on Nairobi's Westgate mall, where the Islamists killed 67 people during a four day siege in 2013.

In a front page editorial entitled "If Westgate was a disaster, what do you call Garissa?" Kenya's biggest-selling Daily Nation newspaper singled out Kenyatta for not meeting the grieving families.

"In Kenya, your child ... is slaughtered, but a little time can't be found in busy diaries for the leader you elected to come and look you in your teary eyes and assure you that he did his best, that the death of your son or daughter has not been in vain, that he feels your pain," it said.

The Standard newspaper rounded on the government for its staunch defense of the security response to the deadliest attack in Kenya since 1998, when al-Qaida bombed the U.S. embassy, killing more than 200 people.

"It is ... morally irresponsible for the government's PR machine to go into overdrive after what everyone acknowledges was a lamentable response," it said.

Even after the editorial, the government once again defended its handling of the atrocity, in which 148 people were killed.

"We commend our security agencies for responding promptly and launching rescue operations and saving lives," Defense Minister Rachel Omamo told reporters.

Diplomats dismissed Kenyatta's pledges to improve security as hollow rhetoric.

"There is no strategy," one senior Western diplomat said. "It's like an air stewardess saying there is absolutely nothing to worry about but in fact there is no one in the cockpit."

Even though Kenyatta's position is not under threat in a country where tribal allegiances trump most issues, public trust in the state's ability to protect its citizens is wavering.

Kenya on Wednesday shut down about a dozen Somali remittance firms and froze the accounts of more than 70 people linked to al-Shabab and "terrorism financing", Kamau Thugge, the principal secretary of Kenya's National Treasury, said. (VOA)