A Kenyan court has sentenced a Tanzanian to life in prison and two other Kenyans to 41 years in prison each for taking a role in University attack that left 148 people dead in the year of 2015 in Kenya.

The three had earlier been found guilty of conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack and of belonging to al-Shabab, which is linked to al-Qaeda.

Reports say this is the second deadliest attack in Kenya after the al-Qaeda militants bombed US Embassy in 1998 killing more than 200 people.

Rashid Charles Mberesero, who was given a life sentence, is a Tanzanian, while the other two men, Mohamed Ali Abikar and Hassan Edin Hassan, are Kenyans.

Mberesero was given the longest term because he was arrested at the scene of the massacre and could not explain his presence, the court heard, the AFP news agency reports.

The attack was carried out by al-shabab at the north-eastern Garissa University in April 2015.

Four gunmen were killed at the scene and the man who plotted the attack, Mohamed Kuno was killed in a raid in Somalia in 2016, BBC reports.

In the early hours of 2 April 2015, heavily armed attackers stormed Garissa University College and shot dead two security guards before aiming fire at students.

The gunmen raided the campus, attacking students in their classrooms while they were preparing for exams.

Witnesses said Christians were singled out by the militants and shot.

More than 500 students managed to escape, some through a fence. Some locked themselves in rooms and cupboards.

Seventy-nine were injured in the attack.

Wearing suicide vests, the four gunmen were eventually surrounded in a dormitory where the vests detonated and they died.

The al-shabab has repeatedly attacked Kenya, including a raid on Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi in September 2013, when 67 people died in a four-day siege.

Al-Shabab says it has been at war with Kenya ever since Kenyan forces entered Somalia in October 2011 in an effort to crush the militants.