New interclan violence wracked parts of remote northern Kenya overnight after a brutal village massacre and reprisal attack killed at least 76 people this week, officials and residents of the region said on Thursday.
Members of the rival Borana and Gabra clans, which have long-running disputes over water and pasture in the semi-arid area near the Ethiopian border, continued to clash following Tuesday’s attack on the village of Turbi, they said.
”Gabra people coming from Sololo say that somebody was killed; there are reports of further attacks in Moyale,” said Bonaya Godana, an MP who represents the district where the violence is occurring.
In Moyale, police Commander Joseph Musyoka said his officers were looking into reports of new interclan attacks in the small isolated community of Rawana, south-west of the town.
”There were reports of overnight shooting in Rawana. We have sent officers to check out,” he said by telephone.
Sololo is a predominantly Borana town about 30km north of Turbi and Moyale is about 45km east of Sololo on the Ethiopian border.
Musyoka said he met Ethiopian officials to ask for their help in tracking down any attackers and recovering hundreds of livestock stolen in the raids.
Godana, a former Kenyan minister of foreign affairs, spoke to news agency AFP on the second day of a visit to Turbi, where between 300 and 500 heavily armed Borana raiders killed 56 Gabra villagers — including 22 children — on Tuesday.
At least 10 of the attackers were killed during and after the raid that was followed by a revenge attack by a group of Gabras that killed 10 Boranas, including four children, after pulling them from a car driven by a priest near Sololo.
Police and residents in Marsabit, the biggest and closest town to Turbi about 150km south, said they had received reports of new violence around Sololo and Moyale but had no word on casualties.
Robert Kipkemoi Kitur, the assistant commissioner of police in Kenya’s Eastern Province, said he had ”heard reports of new attacks” but could not confirm any deaths or injuries.
However, Turbi itself, about 580km north-east of Nairobi, where the victims of Tuesday’s attack were buried on Wednesday, was calm.
”There is calm in Turbi, but people are still mourning,” said Roba Elema, a police reservist and water ministry employee who was the first outsider on the scene on Tuesday and spoke of bloody dead bodies littering the streets.
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki on Wednesday condemned the attacks, which are believed to be the worst single episode of interclan violence to date in the country’s post-colonial history, and called for calm.
But in Nairobi on Thursday, a leading Kenyan human rights group lashed out at Kibaki’s government for failing to ensure security and neglecting the remote region, which has been beset by violence from rival clans in the past.
”That hundreds of armed criminals can terrorise a town for hours without the intervention of the country’s security forces is a clear indication that the government has little or no authority in the north-eastern region,” the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) said.
”Moreover, this incident is indicative of the continuous neglect suffered by Kenyans in the region since independence,” KHRC chairperson Makau Mutua said in a statement. — Sapa-AFP