A Kenyan police death squad strangled, shot and hacked to death 58 people, a policeman who said he witnessed the killings has testified in a videotape made before he was murdered.
Kenya’s government-funded human rights body, which released the video and statements by policeman Bernard Kiriinya yesterday, urged the nation’s police chief to resign over what it said was the officially-sanctioned murder of 500 suspected members of an outlawed gang in 2007.
“We have a police force responsible for the death of over 500 youths, and an ex-officer who appears to have been executed by police after talking about it,” Kenya National Commission on Human Rights vice-chairman Hassan Omar Hassan said.Police deny the allegations.
Adding to the pressure on police commissioner Hussein Ali, the UN’s investigator into extrajudicial killings in Kenya also called for his dismissal and the resignation of attorney-general Amos Wako.
UN rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions Philip Alston made the recommendations at the end of his own damning report into the killings.
“I have received overwhelming testimony that there exists in Kenya a systematic, widespread and well-planned strategy to execute individuals, carried out by the police,” he said of the alleged killing of some 500 suspected Mungiki gang members, shooting of hundreds of people, mainly opposition supporters, during last year’s post-election crisis, and torturing and execution of suspected rebels in the remote Mount Elgon area of western Kenya.
“Kenyan police are a law unto themselves. They kill often, with impunity,” he said.
He lambasted police boss Mr Ali for failing to give him any information in response to allegations against his force. And of the attorney-general, he said: “Mr Wako is the embodiment in Kenya of the phenomenon of impunity.”
Police spokesmen said the release of the video by Kiriinya was mischievously timed for release with the UN report. Mr Kiriinya – whom the rights group says was gunned down in a Nairobi street just outside a safe house last year, several months after giving his testimony – describes in chilling detail what he says was the killing of Mungiki suspects.
The group, known for its macabre tactics, including beheading and skinning victims, runs extortion rackets in central Kenya and says its followers are the heirs of Mau Mau rebels who fought British colonial rulers before independence.
In the video, Mr Kiriinya describes police spraying victims with bullets as they lie face down and hacking them to death with machetes and sticks. – (Reuters)