Police impunity heightens risk of violence as Kenyans go to the polls
Gunmen have killed five Kenyan police officers in the latest attack in the troubled northeast border region close to war-torn Somalia.
Police fired tear gas at women members of a feared Kenyan gang on Friday as they tried to deliver a petition to Prime Minister Raila Odinga. About 50 women, many of them elderly or with children on their backs, assembled at Odinga’s party headquarters, asking to speak with him about alleged illegal police killings of gang members.
Kenyan police on Wednesday arrested scores of members of a criminal sect whose clashes with authorities this week caused 19 deaths, officials said, as the government vowed to deal ruthlessly with the gang. Hundreds of riot police descended on Nairobi’s Eastlands slums and central Kenyan districts.
Kenyan police on Tuesday fired tear gas at demonstrators protesting against the proposed size of a coalition government, as pressure mounted on the president and prime minister-designate to name a Cabinet. President Mwai Kibaki and future prime minister Raila Odinga signed a power-sharing deal last month but have been wrangling over who will get key ministries.
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/ 6 February 2008
Kenya’s political rivals resumed crisis talks on Wednesday despite preparations for a meeting of East African foreign ministers which has angered opposition leaders. The opposition has threatened more street protests if the government chairs Thursday’s planned meeting of the regional body Igad.
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/ 3 February 2008
Kenyan opposition chief Raila Odinga on Sunday called for the deployment of foreign peacekeepers to stem the country’s escalating violence, saying security forces were not impartial in crackdowns. Kenyan police have admitted to killing dozens of arsonists, looters and people who have attacked them during violent demonstrations.
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/ 2 February 2008
African Union leaders condemned the latest unrest in Chad and Kenya on Saturday at the close of a summit overshadowed by new crises on the continent and which saw little headway achieved on older ones. The pan-African body’s summit wrapped up even as military sources said that rebels had seized control of the Chadian capital.
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/ 29 January 2008
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.
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/ 22 January 2008
Former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan was due to arrive in Kenya on Tuesday to try to mediate in a post-poll crisis that has torn the country in two and triggered weeks of violence that has killed hundreds. A hotly disputed election returned President Mwai Kibaki to power last month amid cries from opposition leader Raila Odinga that he rigged it.
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/ 19 January 2008
Two German nationals and a Dutch woman filmmaker were arrested by Kenyan police on suspicions related to terrorism, a police spokesperson said on Friday in Nairobi. The German Foreign Ministry in Berlin identified one of those held as Andrej Hermlin, a Berlin jazz musician.
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/ 18 January 2008
Opposition street protests over the disputed re-election of Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki will end after demonstrations planned for Friday, a spokesperson said. At least eight people have been shot dead by police during two days of protests called by Raila Odinga, leader of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement.
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/ 17 January 2008
Kenyan police clashed with opposition members on Thursday in a second day of unrest over President Mwai Kibaki’s disputed re-election, and the opposition said police had killed seven. In opposition strongholds in the capital, Nairobi, and the western town of Kisumu, police fired tear gas and live bullets and struck at least two people.
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/ 16 January 2008
Kenyan police battled hundreds of opposition protesters on Wednesday, killing two, as the opposition defied a ban on rallies against President Mwai Kibaki’s disputed re-election, witnesses said. In the western opposition stronghold of Kisumu and the coastal city of Mombasa youths began gathering in the morning, some burning tyres.
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/ 14 January 2008
Kenya’s feuding parties prepared on Monday for fresh duels in parliament and on the streets despite another international push to mediate a post-election crisis that has now killed at least 612 people. But for many around the East African nation, the top priority was getting millions of children back to their studies.
Huge numbers of Kenyan police deployed on Friday to block an opposition rally in Nairobi as Washington sent its top Africa diplomat to help resolve a post-election crisis that has claimed more then 350 lives. On Thursday, police had used water cannon and tear gas to disperse opposition supporters marching on the city centre for a "million-man" rally.
Kenyan police fired tear gas and water cannon on Thursday at thousands of anti-government protesters chanting ”Peace” and singing the national anthem as they tried to march to a banned rally. Nairobi became a battleground as shots rang around, crowds ran to-and-fro, riot police thronged the streets and plumes of smoke rose.
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/ 31 December 2007
Defeated opposition candidate Raila Odinga is set to press his claims of vote fraud on Monday at a Nairobi rally to declare him Kenya’s ”People’s President” despite threats of arrest. Mwai Kibaki was sworn in for a second term as Kenyan president on Sunday after being officially declared the winner.
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/ 25 December 2007
Kenyan police fired teargas to disperse stone-throwing supporters of the country’s main presidential contenders on Monday after the candidates made a final push to win votes in a race deemed too close to call. Scuffles briefly flared shortly after President Mwai Kibaki and his opposition challenger, Raila Odinga, addressed huge rallies in the capital.
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/ 26 November 2007
Kenya has offered asylum to nearly two dozen Somali refugees, yielding to opposition to its plans to deport them to violence-torn Mogadishu, officials said on Monday. A military truck transported the 22 refugees from Nairobi to Kenya’s north-eastern Dadaab refugee camp on Saturday after the government dropped plans to deport them.
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/ 26 November 2007
More than 8 000 Kenyans have been executed or tortured to death since 2002 when police launched a crackdown on a banned, politically-linked sect, a group of Kenyan lawyers said on Sunday. Security forces launched a crackdown on the Mungiki sect after it was banned in March 2002.
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/ 20 November 2007
A human rights group condemned Kenya on Tuesday for repatriating 18 Somali refugees who had already been turned away from Uganda despite the horrific security situation in their homeland. Ali-Amin Kimathi, chairperson of the Muslim Human Rights Forum, accused Kenyan police officers of beating some of the refugees.
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/ 5 November 2007
A human rights panel on Monday implicated Kenyan police in the execution of nearly 500 men in the country during a months-long crackdown on the ultra-violent Mungiki gang. The state-run Kenya National Commission on Human Rights said the victims were executed by a single bullet between June and October.
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/ 26 October 2007
A wave of alleged executions by Kenyan police is terrifying anyone with links to those killed, while families of the missing fear their corpses could turn up next. Kenyan police came under fire this week from local rights groups, who say they executed scores of suspected members of the dreaded Mungiki criminal gang and dumped their bodies outside Nairobi.
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/ 24 October 2007
A series of bodies found dumped in secluded bushland on the edge of Kenya’s capital Nairobi has terrified locals and brought accusations of police executions in their war on the notorious Mungiki criminal gang. Locals say more than a dozen corpses have turned up in recent weeks, thrown by the roadside or left in scrub.
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/ 29 September 2007
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.