Garissa, Kenya--Scattered books and dark blood stains on the floor: the bodies have been collected but an abbatoir-like stench permeates the Kenyan university where Islamist gunmen massacred 148 people last week.
In the now quiet grounds, police and soldiers stand under the shade of trees, where students once sat studying or chatting with friends.
Papers and pens lie in the dust, apparently dropped by students as they fled when gunmen from Somalia's Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab launched their killing spree, hurling grenades and firing automatic rifles.
The massacre in Garissa, 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.
On Monday, four days since the day-long violence spree, journalists were briefly allowed for the first time into the campus.
The bullet-scarred buildings remained closed, but peering through the doors and windows, a sense of the carnage and the fury of the violence was clear.
At the three-storey Elgon A hostel, where the worst killings took place, shards of glass from the doors smashed by bullets cover the entrance.
Inside, where the gunmen gathered students together before carrying out their day of slaughter, dark stains of blood cover the floors, showing the magnitude of the massacre.
- Scraps of flesh -
Reuben Nyaora, a clinical officer working for the aid agency International Rescue Committee (IRC), and one of the first frontline medics into the halls, described seeing "bodies everywhere in execution lines... people whose heads had been blown off, bullet wounds everywhere, it was a grisly mess."
Now the rooms are empty, but in places the blood is smeared in long lines, suggesting where a wounded student crawled away in agony in a desperate effort to escape.
Belongings of the students still lie around: a single shoe, a pair of sandals, torn and bloody clothes, some books.
AFP
