NAIROBI: A bomb blast at a guesthouse in north-east Kenya killed at least 12 people on Tuesday, in an attack claimed by Shabaab militants who last hit the area earlier this month.

“We have found 12 bodies so far after we managed to access the building,” said a senior police officer told AFP. “We are still combing the area with the help of anti-terrorism police and sniffer dogs in the ongoing search and rescue.” Eleven men and one woman were killed in the 3:30am (0030 GMT) blast at the Bisharo lodge, a police source told AFP. The toll was confirmed in a government statement that said part of the building was collapsed by the blast.

Kenyan media reported that some of the dead were members of a theatre group due to perform for school children in Mandera.

The Al Qaeda-linked Shaba­ab militant group claimed the attack in a message broadcast by its Radio Andalus media organisation, claiming 15 were killed. “This attack is part of a series of attacks in which the Mujahideen are hunting down infidels” in north-east Kenya, the group said.

It is the second Shabaab strike in Mandera in three weeks. The previous one on Oct 6 killed six people at a gated residential building that mainly housed non-Muslims, less than a kilometre from the volatile Somalia border town of Beled Hawa.

Also on Tuesday, a Shabaab suicide bomber attacked an African Union military base housing Djiboutian soldiers in the central Somali city of Beledweyne. It is not known how many were killed in that attack which comes as Somalia is in the process of selecting parliamentarians, and a new president, due by the end of November.

The Shabaab has fought to overthrow the internationally-backed government in Mogadishu since 2007, but turned its sights on Kenya when the army was sent into Somalia in 2011 to fight the Islamic insurgents.

Published in Dawn, October 26th, 2016