Peter Karungu Mutura heard a loud bang as he drove past Banissa on his way from Moyale to Nairobi through Mandera on February 19. At first, he thought the bus had hit a stone. He was wrong. The sound persisted. “I saw a bullet fly past the steering wheel and quickly realised we were under attack,” Mutura told the Star as he opened up on the terror attack for the first time during an interview on Monday. On that Wednesday morning, Mutura began his 900-plus-kilometre journey with prayer as usual. But less than 200km into the voyage, his Moyale Raha bus came under heavy attack by al Shabaab militants. He was ordered to stop but opted to ignore and drive on. The tyres were deflated by the hail of bullets. All the six had been shot at because the militants wanted to render the vehicle stationary so they could kill all the 60 passengers. “I drove on with all those difficulties until the steering hardened and I could not drive anymore. We were being chased by the attackers who were on motorbikes. I parked the bus on the roadside and all the passengers disembarked and ran into the forest for their lives,” Mutura recalls. The area around Guba in Banissa constituency is heavily forested. Mutura says the terrorists caught up with none of the passengers. The only casualties of the attack were six people shot while inside the bus as the vehicle came under attack. Three of them died on the spot. The driver was among the three other casualties.
While the attack happened two months ago, Mutura has sworn never to return to Mandera. There has been no other attack on a bus on the route for the last two months. “I will never go back there again. I was lucky to survive and I won’t take any risks again,” he said. Officers from the nearby Banissa police station arrived at the scene hours later, Mutura said. They took the three who had been injured to hospital and the others were encouraged to come out of their hideouts and escorted to the police station. The bodies of the other three were taken to the mortuary. They were all taken to the police station. Mutura said the owners of the bus company have since sacked him with no benefits. “I was asked to pay for the deflated tyres and stop asking for the February salary,” the driver said. The company has a fleet of buses plying the Nairobi-Moyale route…..
