Unidentified gunmen raided the remote Kiwayu Safari Village in the early hours of Sunday, shooting dead publishing executive David Tebbutt, 58, and taking hostage his wife Judith, 56, before escaping by boat.
“Al Shabaab has not abducted any Briton from Kenya. We believe bandits carried out the attack,” a senior official of the al Qaeda-linked group told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.
“We shall release a statement later that al Shabaab is not involved,” the rebel official said.
An al Shabaab recruitment officer in Kismayu, 200 km (120 miles) north of the Kenyan border, said Judith Tebbutt had been brought to the port city on Tuesday but her whereabouts were now unknown.
She said the attack had been carried out by militia fighters normally sympathetic to al Shabaab but on this occasion funded by local pirate financiers.
“Pirate investors provided a boat and weapons for the raid. The pirate gang want now to demand a ransom but al Shabaab are against the idea,” said the rebel recruiter, who is married to a senior al Shabaab commander.
She said she received the information by telephone from al Shabaab’s top administration official in Kismayu, the nerve centre for the rebels’ operations in southern Somalia.