Kenyan police silenced the country’s second-biggest media group early on Thursday, closing its television station and burning its newspapers, after it reported that President Mwai Kibaki had held secret talks with a political opponent, witnesses said.
Dozens of hooded officers carrying AK-47 assault rifles stormed into the headquarters of the Standard Group in the capital shortly after midnight and seized transmission equipment for the independent Kenya Television Network (KTN), they said.
They then went to the company’s printing press and set light to thousands of copies of Thursday’s edition of The Standard, Kenya’s oldest newspaper, which had just been published.
”The media group has shut down its operations. The TV is off air after our equipment was seized and the newspaper is out of production because police have burnt printed copies,” KTN news editor Kitua Nzile said.
During the operation, which followed the arrest of three Standard Group journalists on Tuesday, police in civilian clothes briefly detained four employees of KTN and confiscated cellphones from overnight staff. They also harassed night guards, staffers said.
”They stormed the video production unit and ordered us to lie down. They then seized some transmission equipment before detaining us in Milimani and Central police stations,” Shinna Makena, a KTN video editor, said moments after they were released from custody.
An Agence France-Presse journalist saw broken doors, shattered windows and dismantled security cameras in the towering Investment and Mortgage Building that houses the media company in addition to several other private businesses.
The crackdown came after police confirmed detaining three Standard journalists — weekend editions managing editor Chacha Mwita, news editor Dennis Onyango and reporter Ayub Savula — over a report that appeared on Saturday alleging Kibaki had held secret talks with with Kalonzo Musyoka, a former environment minister who was fired for campaigning against a draft Constitution.
The draft, which would have given Kibaki more power in the first changes to the East African country’s 1962 independence charter, was resoundingly defeated in a referendum last November, forcing Kibaki to reorganise his Cabinet and fire renegade ministers.
Kibaki’s press office and Kalonzo himself have denied that any such meeting took place and government spokesperson Alfred Mutua has demanded that the Standard retract the article and apologise, which it has not yet done.
The arrests drew scathing condemnation from local and international press watchdogs, who warned the government against clamping down on press freedom.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called the reporters’ arrests an attempt to criminalise journalism.
”We call on authorities to release our colleagues immediately and unconditionally, and ensure that the Kenyan press is free to report on political developments without such intimidation,” CPJ chief Ann Cooper said in a statement.
”The same people who are trying to muzzle the media used to feed journalists with propaganda when they were in the opposition,” Kenya Union of Journalists (KUJ) secretary general Ezekiel Mutua told reporters late on Tuesday.
Kenya’s High Court is to hear on Thursday a suit filed by the paper’s lawyer, Chacha Odera, seeking the immediate release of the three since they have not been charged with any offence.
Last month, police charged four weekly newspaper journalists for publishing a report that claimed Kibaki was senile and his government was torn apart by infighting.
Kibaki came to power in December 2002 when long-serving president Daniel arap Moi, whose regime was notorious for clamping down on press freedom, retired. — Sapa-AFP