Tanzania says gunman who killed four people last month was a terrorist

September 2, 2021

DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) -Tanzanian police said on Thursday the slain gunman who killed three police officers and a private security guard on a rampage through a diplomatic quarter of Tanzania’s main city Dar es Salaam last month was a terrorist.

In the Aug. 25 attack, Hamza Mohammed shot two police officers with a pistol at a city intersection, before taking their rifles and heading to the nearby French embassy where he shot the security guard.

“Our investigation has found that Hamza was a terrorist,” Camilius Wambura, Director of Criminal Investigation (DCI), told reporters in the lake city of Mwanza.

The gunman had been accessing extremist content from social media pages depicting terror acts by Islamist groups al Shabaab and ISIS, Wambura said.

Al Shabaab is an Islamist group that has for years been fighting to topple the government in Somalia and seeking to establish its own rule based on its own strict interpretation of Islam’s sharia law.

The gunman was also in communication “with other people who live in countries with terrorism related acts but mainly he was learning through radical social media pages,” Wambura said.

(Reporting by Nuzulack Dausen; Writing by Maggie Fick; editing by Elias Biryabarema and Alex Richardson)

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