NAIROBI: 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.

It’s 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 they did in the April siege of Garissa University, in the country’s east, that left 147 dead.

But not this time. The Muslims on board the bus en route from Nairobi to the northeastern city of Mandera would not isolate themselves from their fellow passengers, according to Reuters.

Mandera county, where the attack took place, is in Kenya’s northeast along the border with Somalia. When the militants attempted to sort through the passengers, they told “locals” — most of whom are Muslim and ethnic Somalis — that they could get back on and be spared.

They refused.

“We even gave some non-Muslims our religious attire to wear in the bus so that they would not be identified easily. We stuck together tightly,” Abdi Mohamud Abdi, a Muslim who was among the passengers on the bus, told Reuters. “The militants threatened to shoot us but we still refused and protected our brothers and sisters.”

“The locals showed a sense of patriotism and belonging to each other,” Mandera Governor Ali Roba told The Star, a Kenyan daily. He said that the passengers insisted that Al-Shabab either “kill them together or leave them alone.”

Two people were killed before another vehicle approached and the militants ran off, thinking it was the police, passenger Abdirashid Adan told the Daily Nation. At least three others were wounded, Adan among them.

“Some of the Christian enemies died and others were injured,” Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, Al-Shabab’s military spokesman, told Reuters in a statement. The militants did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Muslim passengers’ actions during the attack.