The European Union pledged Friday to support Kenya's fight against extremism after 147 people were killed by Somalia's al-Qaida-affiliated Shebab Islamists in an attack on a university.

"Violent extremism has once again targeted the right of the people of Kenya to live in peace and freedom of religion," the bloc's foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said in a statement.

Piles of bodies and pools of blood running down the corridors: survivors of the Kenya university massacre described how laughing gunmen taunted their victims amid scenes of total carnage.

Salias Omosa, an 20-year-old education student, said the victims were woken up at gunpoint in Thursday's pre-dawn attack, and Muslims and non-Muslims picked out by "how they were dressed".

The bodies of dozens of students massacred by Somalia's Shebab Islamists at a Kenyan university arrived in the capital Friday, as grieving relatives faced a desperate wait to receive the remains of their loved ones.

The day-long siege of Garissa University in which 147 people, mostly students, were killed was Kenya's deadliest attack since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, and the bloodiest ever by the Al-Qaida-affiliated militants.

Masked gunmen from Somalia's Shebab Islamist group stormed a Kenyan university Thursday as students were sleeping, hurling grenades and shooting dead at least 15 people before taking Christians hostage.

Scores of others were wounded in the assault, still ongoing over 12 hours after the first grenades were used to blast open the gates of the university in the northeastern town of Garissa, near the lawless border with war-torn Somalia.

Refugees fleeing war-torn Yemen have arrived by boat in almost equally violent Somalia, the United Nations said on Wednesday in a surprising reversal of a decades old trend which saw Somalis escaping to Yemen.

The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said the "first groups of Yemenis fleeing conflict" have arrived on Somalia's northern coastline after crossing the dangerous seas of the Gulf of Aden and landing in the semi-autonomous regions of Somaliland and Puntland.

A key trial in Uganda of 13 men accused of taking part in Al-Shebab bombings that killed 76 people in 2010 was postponed Tuesday after the top prosecutor was shot dead.

Police on Tuesday vowed to catch the killers of Joan Kagezi, acting assistant director of public prosecution, who was murdered by men on a motorbike as she drove home with three of her children on Monday evening.

Somali government officials say they have taken control of the hotel where extremist gunmen were holed up for more than 12 hours in an attack that has left at least 17 people dead.

Capt. Mohamed Hussein said Saturday the gunfire had stopped and security agents have accessed the whole building. Hussein had earlier said the gunmen were believed to have occupied the third and fourth floor of the the Maka Al-Mukarramah hotel in the capital Mogadishu.

At least one person was killed on Friday in a car bombing near a hotel in Somalia's capital Mogadishu, police said.

The blast, which was heard across the city and was followed by the sound of bursts of gunfire, hit an area near the Maka al Mukarama hotel, a police official told AFP.

Uganda said Thursday it was boosting security over threats by Somalia's Shebab militants, hours after the U.S. embassy in Kampala warned its citizens of a possible imminent terror attack.

In an emergency warning issued late Wednesday, the U.S. mission in Kampala said it had "received information of possible terrorist threats to locations where Westerners, including U.S. citizens, congregate in Kampala, and that an attack may take place soon".

Pirates have seized an Iranian vessel fishing illegally off the coast of Somalia in the first successful hijacking in almost three years, officials said Thursday, raising fears that the scourge of Somali piracy may be returning.

"An Iranian vessel, fishing illegally in Somali waters, was hijacked earlier this week," said Alan Cole of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).