Gunfire erupts in Kenya’s Lamu district

Gunfire has erupted in the Kenyan coastal district of Lamu, where more than 60 people were killed by militants last month.

The shooting erupted in the Hindi trading center near Mpeketoni town, Kenya’s National Disaster Operations Center (NDOC) said in a statement posted on Twitter.

There were no reports of casualties in the incident. The NDOC said local officials and police were deployed to the scene and that the site “has been secured.”

The Kenya Red Cross also said its emergency teams were dispatched to the area, adding that “police are investigating the incident.”

Somalia’s al-Shabab fighters claimed responsibility for the incident, saying that 10 people were killed in the attack.

“The attackers came back home safely to their base,” the group’s spokesman, Abdulaziz Abu Musab, said.

More than 60 people were killed last month in two separate attacks in the town of Mpeketoni with al-Shabab claiming responsibility for the attacks, saying they were in response to the presence of Kenyan troops in Somalia as part of the African Union force supporting the Somali government.

Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta, however, denied that al-Shabab fighters carried out the attacks and blamed “local political networks.”

Kenya currently has over 4,000 army soldiers stationed in southern Somalia, where they have been battling al-Shabab.

Kenya sent troops into Somalia in late 2011, after al-Shabab fighters carried out a series of raids inside Kenya. The Kenyan forces are part of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), which gets training and equipment from the United States.