Kenya opposition claims office raided by police
Kenya’s main opposition coalition said one of its offices in a Nairobi suburb was raided by police who took dozens of computers, servers and surveillance equipment.
Cables were dismantled, a door was broken and chairs and tables turned upside down at the offices in the suburb of Westland, days before the general elections on Tuesday.
“One of our centres, our tallying centres, was raided in the course of the evening,” Musalia Mudavadi, one of the leaders of the National Super Alliance said on Friday.
“They damaged the place and disappeared with all the desktops, some laptops as well.”
Earlier, the alliance said that “police in hoods and armed with AK47s and machineguns raided different offices” belonging to the coalition. No raid at any other office was confirmed.
“They were all armed and when they walked in they introduced themselves as policemen and were brandishing guns. Others were left outside while others went in,” said a guard at the Westland building.
“They had covered their faces and from the way they spoke they were very confident and were not in a hurry.”
A senior police officer denied any knowledge of the raid.
Mr Musavadi said: “We have no doubt this is the work of the government. It is unfortunate they have resorted to this, but I can assure you that this will not deter us at all.”
Polls show the alliance’s flag-bearer Raila Odinga in a dead heat with longtime rival, president Uhuru Kenyatta, and tensions are rising.
Mr Odinga said the only way he will lose is if the poll is rigged. It is his fourth attempt at the presidency and he claims elections in 2007 and 2013 were stolen from him.
His alliance has locked horns with the national election commission, with plans to set up a parallel tallying centre to announce its own results.
Mr Kenyatta’s ruling Jubilee party denounced it as an effort to dispute the results.
But the commission eventually agreed to the opposition plan, as long as it did not announce its own final result.
The country was also shaken by the murder and torture of a top IT official at the commission, who oversaw an electronic voting system regarded as crucial to the success of the poll.
He was found strangled in a forest on the outskirts of Nairobi last weekend.
While 2013 polls were largely peaceful, it is a decade since a disputed 2007 presidential election led to two months of violence, killing 1,100 people and leaving about 600,000 displaced.