How global media covered Garissa varsity massacre

Garissa University College attack mastermind Mohammed Abdirahim Abdullahi (in the foreground). His was among stories that were covered widely by international media in the aftermath of the massacre. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP.      

By Pius Maundu, The Citizen Correspondent

In Summary

The BBC, AlJazeera, New York Times, CNN, Associated Press, Reuters, Daily Mail and The Guardian relentlessly followed the story from the day it broke out and kept their audiences fed with the associated developments.

Nairobi. As friends and families across Kenya continued to mourn their kin killed by gunmen in Garissa University College, international media brought the atrocity to the rest of the world.

The BBC, AlJazeera, New York Times, CNN, Associated Press, Reuters, Daily Mail and The Guardian relentlessly followed the story from the day it broke out and kept their audiences fed with the associated developments.

Initially, most of the media cautiously reported the invasion of the college by Al-Shabaab militants and relied on conservative statistics on victims as supplied by authorities and the Red Cross.

But when the number of those killed by the jihadists shot from 15 to 60 and eventually 147 by the end of the siege on Thursday, variances in the stories told emerged. New York Times wrote a comprehensive report on the invasion stopping midway to chide at the government’s intervention on terrorism.

“Despite new security laws, significant Western help and a heightened state of vigilance that has already put police officers on almost every major street corner in the capital, Nairobi, Kenya remains squarely in the cross hairs of the Shabab,” wrote the New York-based newspaper.

An equally detailed story was carried by The Guardian on Thursday.

And on Monday, stories by the BBC, Associated Press and Reuters on a Kenyan University of Nairobi Law graduate identified by the government as one of the masterminds of the bloodbath were marketed on Yahoo.com homepage.

“He was named as Abdirahim Abdullahi, whose father is a local chief in Mandera County in the north-east of the country,” said BBC in its story carried online.

But it is the story on how the government was planning to tame the perpetrators of the attack that earned popularity across the international media.

On Saturday, Reuters reported that President Uhuru Kenyatta had vowed that the insurgents would not carve out a section of the country. In a three-paragraph piece headlined “Kenyatta says will stop Somali militants creating caliphate in Kenya,” the news wire quoted the president’s commitment to taming the Al-Shabaab verbatim.

From this organisation, the president had said that counter-terrorism efforts have been derailed by Kenyans helping Al-Shabaab to plan and bankroll attacks. And when authorities paraded the bodies of the four Al-Shabaab killers in Garissa town, Associated Press photographer Ben Curtis took their photos and shared them on the agency’s website.

Triumpant stories

Triumphant stories like that of Cynthia Cherotich, a brave Literature student who played dead for two days inside a wardrobe in her hostel, did not miss out in video and text on the online edition of the Daily Mail. In addition, social media remained awash with texts lambasting the terror attack, and others pointing fingers at the government for not doing enough to secure the country.

On Twitter, #147notjustanumber, a hashtag by social-political activists to humanise and mourn the lives of the 142 students and six security officers killed in the attack, was trending for the better part of the week.

“Kenya is not a nation if we can’t properly memorialise each and every citizen we lose,” said Ory Okolloh Mwangi.