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| Kenya's government is under pressure for both its handling of intelligence and its response to the Westgate attack |
Kenya's interior minister has sacked 15 immigration officers as investigations into the Westgate mall siege continue.
Joseph Ole Lenku said the officials had endangered national security by issuing ID documents to illegal immigrants.
He also said the government would start repatriating Somali refugees to prevent further attacks.
At least 67 people died when militants from the Somali Islamist al-Shabab group attacked the Nairobi shopping centre last month.
Kenya is host to the largest refugee camp in the world,
Dadaab - home to about half a million people - near the Somali border,
while it is believed that more than 30,000 Somali refugees live in the
Kenyan capital, Nairobi, alone.
'Welcomed with open arms'
Mr Lenku said the sacked immigration officers would appear in court to face the law.
The government would also be carrying out a
thorough audit of identity cards and passports issued in the country in
the last two years, he said.
"This exercise will enable us flush out all those who have
been issued with illegal passports and other identification documents,"
Kenya's Star newspaper quoted him as saying.
"We have welcomed with open arms, refugees fleeing from
insecurity in neighbouring countries but we won't allow them to harm
us," he added in his address to journalists in Nairobi.
"Because of the returning calm in some parts of the Federal
Republic of Somali, the process of repatriating Somali refugees has
started," he said.
Kenya has about 4,000 troops in the south of Somalia as part
of the UN-backed African Union force which has made significant advances
against al-Shabab in the last two years, recapturing the area's main
cities.
But the militants still control many smaller towns and large rural areas of southern Somalia.
The BBC's Gabriel Gatehouse in Nairobi says this is not the
first time those fleeing the violence in neighbouring Somalia have been
thrust uncomfortably into the spotlight.
Even before Westgate, some politicians had blamed elements in
the country's Dadaab refugee camp for attacks inside Kenya, he says.
Previous attempts to repatriate Somali refugees have met with
strong resistance, both from the UN and Kenya's own courts, our
reporter adds.
But more than a month after the attack on the shopping mall,
the Kenyan government is under pressure - both its handling of
intelligence and its response to the attack itself have been called into
question, he says.
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| The interior ministry is investigation security lapses following the Westgate siege |
Somalia's envoy to Kenya, Mohamed Ali Nur, has warned against blaming the refugees.
"These refugees who are in the camps are innocent people. I
want to say that the refugees themselves have been victims. Some of them
were killed, some women were raped, and kids were killed," Kenya's
Daily Nation newspaper quoted him as saying on Tuesday.
Al-Shabab, which is part of the al-Qaeda network, is banned
as a terrorist group by both the US and the UK and is believed to have
between 7,000 and 9,000 fighters.
Its members are fighting to create an Islamic state in
Somalia and the group said it had staged the Westgate attack in response
to Kenya's presence on Somali territory.
Officials initially said 10 to 15 gunmen were involved, but
CCTV footage appears to show only four militants, who the Kenyan
military say all died by the end of the siege.
The BBC's Newsnight programme has revealed that one of the
four attackers is suspected of being a 23-year-old Somalia-born
Norwegian national, Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow.
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