By Elahe Izadi and Sarah Kaplan December 22 at 9:20 AM
There was a sound of gunfire, and the impact of bullets striking steel, and the bus suddenly lurched to a stop just outside the northeastern Kenyan city of El Wak.

More than 10 Somali militants clambered on board, heavily armed, witnesses of the Monday attack told the Daily Nation, a Kenyan newspaper. The gunmen began shouting demands at the passengers, ordering them to get off the bus and separate into groups — Muslims on one side, everyone else on the other.

But Muslims aboard the bus traveling through northeastern Kenya helped protect the Christian passengers, witnesses and officials told numerous media outlets.

Two people died and at least three were injured during the attack on the bus and a truck, confirmed Mandera County Gov. Ali Roba, who described it as an act of terrorism.

A Kenyan security official, Mohamud Saleh, said al-Shabab rebels are thought to be responsible, the Associated Press reported. A spokesman for the Somalia-based Islamist militant group told Reuters that fighters shot at the bus and “some of the Christian enemies died and others were injured.”
Officials and witnesses said militants stopped the bus, asked passengers to identify their religion, and then attempted to separate them.

It has happened before. In November 2014, al-Shabab gunmen attacked a bus full of teachers in the same region, pulling 28 non-Muslim passengers from the vehicle and shooting them point blank, according to the Guardian. The following month, the BBC reported, the militant group did the same to non-Muslim workers at a quarry near the Somali border. The group has also indiscriminately killed both Muslims and non-Muslims during deadly attacks in Kenya, as it did in the April siege of Garissa University, in the country’s east, that left 147 people dead.

But not this time. Militants told passengers to get off the bus, “demanding that Muslims separate from Christians, but they refused,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement, according to Agence France-Presse.

“These Muslims sent a very important message of the unity of purpose, that we are all Kenyans and that we are not separated by religion,” Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery told local media at a briefing. “Everybody can profess their own religion, but we are still one country and one people.”