Dozens killed as Kenyans take to streets after election

AT LEAST 24 people were killed in Kenya yesterday, including a nineyear-old girl, as outrage over the disputed re-election of Uhuru Kenyatta as president unleashed the country’s worst political violence in a decade.

In the slums of Nairobi, police fired tear gas and live ammunition as they attempted to prevent supporters of Raila Odinga, the defeated presidential candidate, from marching on a park in the centre of Kenya’s capital.

With violence also erupting in the west of the country, the opposition claimed that more than 100 people had been killed. Stirred to fury by Mr Odinga’s as yet unsubstantiated claim that an elaborate conspiracy had denied him victory, his supporters poured on to the streets within moments of Mr Kenyatta officially being declared the winner late on Friday night.

A community leader, who asked to be identified only as Otieno, said he had been able to confirm four deaths in Kibera, but feared there could have been many more. “They are gunning down my people but we don’t know exactly how many because they have taken most of the bodies away,” he said.

The government, whose supporters have also taken to the streets in celebration, called the protesters looters.

In a country bitterly divided along ethnic lines, many of Mr Odinga’s fellow Luos have begun to turn on the president’s Kikuyu tribe, in a disturbing echo of the bloodshed that claimed 1,300 lives after Mr Odinga lost an election in 2007.

A hospital in Mathare reported a number of people with machete wounds suggesting injuries caused by ethnic, rather than police, violence.

However, most fatalities were from gunshot wounds inflicted by police, human rights groups said.