Kenyan police have been ordered to shoot to kill looters, arsonists, people carrying weapons or people blocking roads, a commander said yesterday, in a bid to stem violence sparked by disputed elections.
The order, made for the second time since President Mwai Kibaki's widely-contested re-election last month, followed the formal launch of crisis talks between Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, who claims he was robbed of the presidency.
It also came amid increasing international condemnation of the spiral of violence in which almost 1,000 people have died and more than a quarter of a million have been displaced.
"There are four categories of people who will face tough police action: Those looting property, burning houses, carrying offensive weapons, barricading roads," the police commander said, a day after military helicopters fired above ethnic fighting in the lakeside town of Naivasha, the latest flashpoint.
"We have orders to shoot to kill these categories of people if they are caught in the act," he said.
The last time police issued "shoot-to-kill" orders was earlier this month when gangs were attacking police in a first wave of post-election violence.
"Police will henceforth be very forceful on groups of persons carrying out activities that threaten the lives and property of others," police spokesman Eric Kiraithe said yesterday.
The military has so far played a backseat role in response to the violence, clearing barricades on the main road linking the capital to western Kenya and assisting in enforcing a curfew in the western town of Nakuru.
Soldiers armed with assault rifles and whips patrolled the tense streets of Naivasha yesterday, some 80km northwest of Nairobi, where three died the previous day.
No clashes were reported, but several stalls were burned down in the town center and the army said it had arrested a suspected arsonist.
Meanwhile, US envoy Jendayi Frazer said yesterday that violence in Kenya's Rift Valley represented "clear ethnic cleansing" aimed at chasing out President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu people.
Frazer said she did not consider the eruption of ethnic clashes in Kenya a genocide. What she had seen in a visit earlier this month to the Rift Valley, in violence that pitted Kalenjin against Kikuyu, "was clear ethnic cleansing," she told reporters on the sidelines of an African Union summit in Addis Ababa. "The aim originally was not to kill, it was to cleanse, it was to push them out of the region," she said.
Also yesterday, Kenyan activists pleaded for an end to the ongoing violence.
"Peace," "Love," "Sorry," read cards on wreaths of flowers among dozens starting to be laid by the activists and other concerned citizens at Nairobi's "Freedom Corner" in the center of the capital.
"Stop the killing now," read another.
Used to their nation being seen as a relatively peaceful haven in a turbulent region, Kenyans are aghast at scenes of people being hacked, burned or clubbed to death in Nairobi slums and around the volatile Rift Valley.
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