No Easter Celebration In Kenya, As They Morn Massacre Victims

NAIROBI: Kenya on Sunday began three days of national mourning for the 148 people, mostly students, massacred by Somalia's al-Shabaab jihadists at a university in Garissa.

Easter church services throughout Kenya included prayers for the victims of Thursday's attack, with flags also at half mast.

Although President Uhuru Kenyatta has vowed to retaliate "in the severest way possible", there have also been calls for national unity.

Kenyatta said people's "justified anger" should not lead to "the victimization of anyone" — a clear reference to Kenya's large Muslim and ethnic Somali minorities.

A survivor of an attack by al-Shabaab on a university campus in Garissa, northern Kenya is comforted by a colleague after arriving in Nairobi, on April 4, 2015. (AFP photo)

Authorities meanwhile announced that they had identified one of the four dead Shabaab gunmen as an ethnic-Somali and Kenyan national who was a A-grade pupil and law graduate — highlighting the al-Qaida-linked Shabaab's ability to recruit within Kenya.

Interior ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said it was "critical that parents whose children go missing or show tendencies of having been exposed to violent extremism report to authorities".

The militants attacked the university at dawn, and lined up non-Muslim students for execution in what Kenyatta described as a "barbaric medieval slaughter".

A woman prays during the service at the Our Lady of Consolation Church, which was attacked with grenades by militants almost three years ago, in Garissa, Kenya, on April 5, 2015. (AP photo)

The massacre, Kenya's deadliest attack since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, claimed the lives of 142 students, three police officers and three soldiers.