Hundreds of people carrying their possessions in makeshift carts fled on Friday from Kenya’s Mathare slum, where at least 33 people have died in a police crackdown on Kenya’s deadly Mungiki gang.
At least 500 police officers tore through the shantytown in Nairobi on Thursday, shooting dead at least 11 people, ripping down shacks and beating people, after two officers were killed by the Mungiki criminal gang late on Monday.
Police on Tuesday killed 22 people they said were Mungiki suspects resisting arrest.
”Most of the men have already left,” one woman holding a baby told Reuters as she walked with a trail of women.
”We thought it was okay for us to stay with the children but yesterday [Thursday] we found out it was not.”
Mungiki began in the 1990s as a quasi-religious sect but police say it is now a large organised crime operation with members across central Kenya and Nairobi.
The gang holds a tight grip on Mathare, forcing residents to buy their water and electricity illegally at high prices and pay protection money and other ”taxes”.
”I am afraid of Mungiki by night and the police by day,” another woman said as she beat a trail out of the valley-slum carrying a TV antenna and a plastic bag of cooking utensils. — Reuters