Two gunmen shouting in a foreign language ran into a small church at a Kenyan coastal town of Likoni in Mombasa and shot indiscriminately at the congregation on Sunday, killing six people and wounding several others, Reuters reported. This came just a few days after Kenyan police with the help of US FBI officer arrested and charged two Somalis with terrorism offences after police seized a car packed with explosives capable of bringing down a 22 storey building.

Aljazeera said tension has increased along Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast, particularly among Muslim youths who claim the security forces have been heavy handed in their crackdown on suspected recruitments into the Islamist militant sect al-shabab in Somalia.

The Somali al-Qaeda linked group al-Shabab and local sympathizers have carried out multiple attacks in Kenya, in revenge for the Kenyan army’s intervention in Somalia to crush the Islamist rebels. 67 people were killed in an al-Shabab attack on a shopping mall in the capital Nairobi in September.

“Worshippers were trying to prepare themselves for the service. It is alleged that the group of two men stormed the church and one of them started firing randomly at the worshippers,” said Peter Mureithi, Likoni’s police chief.