Dozens of children filed silently into the room, their eyes on the cracks in the floor. One by one they told of being tortured by the Kenyan army.

Kenyan security forces have tortured more than 4 000 people in an indiscriminate offensive against rebels in the remote Mount Elgon area, local rights groups said on Sunday. Activists said the systematic abuses -- including crawling on barbed wire -- was the worst wave of torture in Kenya under the government of President Mwai Kibaki.

Church leader Wycliffe Masibo describes seeing an elderly member of his flock whipped to death during a Kenyan army search for militiamen in his remote mountain village. Having made all the men lie on the floor, soldiers kicked and hit them, demanding they tell them where guns were kept.

The Kenyan army has launched a massive crackdown on a tribal militia in western Kenya that has killed hundreds of people in recent months, officials said on Monday. Police estimate that the militia has killed at least 500 people in the past year alone and displaced thousands of others. Last week, the group attacked a village in the area and killed 15 people.

Britain on Tuesday said that the Kenyan army is now "by far the best option" to stop a sectarian bloodbath as peace talks in Nairobi between the government and opposition were suspended. Former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan suspended talks between the government and the opposition negotiating teams after it became clear they were going nowhere.

Kenyan security forces struggled on Tuesday to contain escalating violence as the post-election unrest claimed its first victim among the country's politicians. Heavily armed Kenyan army soldiers patrolled the volatile Rift Valley capital, Nakuru, on Tuesday while paramilitary police guarded the town of Naivasha, the new epicentre of tribal fighting.

A helicopter pilot described on Friday how he had been forced to drink his own urine and eat leaves to survive for eight days and nights after crashing in the depths of the Kenyan jungle. Solomon Nyanjui broke several ribs when his helicopter crashed on November 15 in the Mount Kenya region.

The United States on Friday warned that Somali Islamist militants might kidnap Western tourists on vulnerable Kenyan beaches. In a message to US nationals in Kenya, the US embassy in Nairobi said it had received information that Islamic extremists from southern Somalia may be planning kidnapping operations across the border.