20120402
AFP
At least one person was killed and 14 others were wounded in attacks on a restaurant in the Kenyan city of Mombasa and a church gathering in the nearby town of Mtwapa, police said.

In Mtwapa "what appears to be a grenade" was thrown at a Christian religious gathering injuring 12 people, Coast province police chief Aggrey Adoli told AFP.

A second police source, who asked not to be named, said one of the 12 died from his injuries on his way to or on arrival at hospital.

Adoli said that a second grenade was "hurled at a restaurant in Mombasa" and that three people, including one police officer, sustained minor injuries.

He had earlier said no one was injured in the Mombasa attack, which local people said targeted a restaurant next door to the football stadium popular with non-Muslims and renowned for serving pork delicacies.

"It's people from upcountry who go there and they go for the pork dishes," another local police officer told AFP.

Adoli said the first blast in Mtwapa occurred after 8:00 pm (1700 GMT) and the second within minutes of it.

Since Kenya sent tanks and troops into Somalia late last year, a whole series of grenade attacks and explosions have taken place, both in Nairobi and in eastern towns and camps housing Somali refugees close to the border.

Targets have ranged from police vehicles to local bars to churches. The Kenyan authorities often blame such attacks on Somalia's Al Qaeda-affiliated Shebab rebels.

Blasts in Nairobi have targeted bus terminuses and back-street bars. Attackers who lobbed grenades into a church compound in the eastern town of Garissa in November, killing two, were heard shouting about the consumption of alcohol.

A later attack on Garissa on New Year's Eve killed five people and injured 21 when attackers threw grenades into an open air bar and then gunned down party goers as they scattered.

Saturday's blasts were the first reported in the coastal areas, which are among Kenya's great tourist magnets, since the Somalia incursion.

Mombasa's resort hotels line the coast, away from the town centre.

Earlier this month attackers tossed four grenades into a busy bus terminus in Nairobi, killing nine people and wounded more than 60. The attack was the deadliest since an Al Qaeda-claimed bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa in 2002.

Somalia's extremist Shebab rebels whom Kenya blamed for staging that attack denied responsibility, but threatened to launch attacks on a much bigger scale against Nairobi, in retaliation for its crossing into Somalia.

Some observers see the attacks as the work of isolated Shebab sympathisers, arguing that they have so far spared the high-profile international targets such as luxury resorts or safari camps that would cause significant damage to Kenya's economy by hurting tourism, a sector that has only just recovered from the impact of the post-election violence in 2008.