Hours after the Shabaab’s warning, police in Garissa paraded four corpses of the gunmen piled on top of each other face down in the back of a pick-up truck.
Five men have also been arrested in connection with the attack, including three “coordinators” captured as they fled towards Somalia, and two others in the university.
The two arrested on campus included a security guard and a Tanzanian found “hiding in the ceiling” and holding grenades, the interior ministry said.
A $215,000 (200,000 euro) bounty has also been offered for alleged Shabaab commander Mohamed Mohamud, a former Kenyan teacher said to be the mastermind behind the attack.
The Shabaab fled their power base Somalia’s capital Mogadishu in 2011, and continue to battle an African Union force, AMISOM, sent to drive them out that includes troops from Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda.
The group has carried out a string of revenge attacks in neighbouring countries, notably Kenya and Uganda, in response to their participation in the AU force.
Shabaab fighters also carried out the Westgate shopping mall attack in Nairobi in September 2013, a four-day siege which left at least 67 people dead.
– Security forces criticised –
Forensic investigators aided by foreign experts continued to scour the site, where one student survivor emerged unharmed from a wardrobe Saturday where she had hidden for over two days.
The remaining 600 traumatised student survivors from the now-closed college have since left Garissa, boarding buses for their home towns.
Over 200 family members of those killed continue their agonising wait for the remains of their loved ones at the main mortuary in Nairobi.
One of them was 50-year-old Abraham Koech, who last heard from his daughter when she called him on Thursday saying, “Terrorists have come and I’m hiding under the bed.”
Koech said identification of corpses was difficult because the “bullets have deformed the heads” of the victims.
There has been growing criticism in the media that critical intelligence warnings were missed, and that special forces units took seven hours to reach the university, some 365 kilometres (225 miles) from the capital.
Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed defended the response, telling AFP that “fighting terrorism… is like being a goalkeeper. You have 100 saves, and nobody remembers them. They remember that one that went past you.”
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