Protests intensify as campaigners shot dead in the street

Published on Friday 6 March 2009 21:02

THE murder of two campaigners against illegal police killings in Kenya aroused protests yesterday and heaped pressure on a divided coalition government.

Foreign and domestic condemnation of the killings, which occurred hours after a government spokesman accused the activists of being a front for a brutal crime gang, poured in.

"I fear we are flirting with lawlessness in the name of keeping law and order. In the process, we are hurtling towards failure as a state," said the prime minister, Raila Odinga.

Unidentified gunmen killed Kamau Kingara, a director of the Oscar Foundation, and the organisation's programmes co-ordinator, Paul Oulo, after blocking their car on a central Nairobi street following a day of protests on Thursday by the Mungiki gang in central Kenya.

Small demonstrations broke out afterwards and a student was shot dead by police in the early hours of Friday. Police said three officers were arrested for using live ammunition against students, who had taken the body of one of the activists.

Students protested again as darkness fell yesterday, and police fired tear-gas at youths blocking a street and throwing stones and bottles outside the Nairobi University campus.

Gathering protests against alleged police killings have added to widespread disillusionment with the poor record of the year-old coalition government, which was formed to end the east African country's bloody post-election crisis a year ago.

The two Oscar Foundation officials had mobilised protests against what they said was the illegal killing of 1,721 young people and the disappearance of 6,542 others suspected by the police of being Mungiki members or sympathisers.

Other rights groups and a United Nations investigator put the number killed in a crackdown, mainly in 2007, at 500.

The Mungiki gang is known for extortion and gruesome killings, including beheadings.