கென்யா: சர்ச்சுக்குள் புகுந்த கிறிஸ்துவர்கள் கூண்டோடு எரிப்பு: இஸ்லாமிய பயங்கரவாதிகள் குரூரம்

சர்ச்சுக்குள் தஞ்சம் புகுந்திருந்த 50க்கும் மேற்பட்ட குழந்தைகள் பெண்கள் ஆண்கள் கொளுத்தப்பட்டுள்ளனர். தேர்தல் முடிவில் 300 பேருக்கும் மேற்பட்டவர்கள் பலியாகியுள்ளனர்

Kenya: Violence Death Toll Hits 300
New Vision (Kampala)
1 January 2008
Posted to the web 2 January 2008
Kampala

ABOUT 30 people, many of them children, were burned to death yesterday in a church in Eldoret, in western Kenya, where they had taken shelter from tribal clashes as post-election violence continued to sweep the country.

"I saw about 10 to 15 bodies crammed in a corner. They were charred, I could not look at the scene twice," a local reporter told Reuters from Eldoret town.


The incident raises concerns that the violence, which has now claimed nearly 300 lives, could develop into a full-blown ethnic conflict.

The reporter said about 200 people, mostly Kikuyus, had sought refuge at the church, about 8km from Eldoret, fleeing tribal clashes after President Mwai's re-election.

"Some youths came to the church. They fought with the boys who were guarding it, but they were overpowered and the youths set fire to the church," he said. Another local journalist in Eldoret said about 30 bodies lay in the church, while four more lay outside.

"This is the first time in history that any group has attacked a church. We never expected the savagery to go so far," police spokesman Eric Kiraithe told a news conference in Nairobi last night.

Reinforcements were being rushed to the area to arrest all troublemakers, he said. "Our officers are exercising a lot of restraint in maintaining the law. This restraint will not last forever," he warned.

By press time, thousands of terrified Kikuyus had taken shelter in churches in Eldoret as vigilante gangs roamed outside.

"There are four to five thousand in the main cathedral, and thousands in other churches," Father Paul Brennan, an Irish Catholic priest told Reuters from the town.

"Houses are being burned. It is too dangerous to go outside and count the dead." Eldoret, located in the Rift Valley, a stronghold of opposition candidate Raila Odinga, has witnessed some of the worst violence.

Earlier in the day, a top police commander told AFP the nature of attacks in the Rift Valley were ethnic cleansing.

"One tribe is targeting another one in a fashion that can rightly be described as ethnic cleansing," said the commander on anonymity.

In Garissa, a town in northeastern Kenya near the border with Somalia, six Kikuyu families cowered at a mosque.

"These are your neighbours, you've lived with them for long," said the mosque's leader, Sheikh Ali, in a New Year sermon, calling for peace and tolerance between tribes. World leaders called on the rival leaders to stem the violence and open dialogue.

"What I want to see is them coming together, I want to see talks and I want to see reconciliation and unity" said British Premier Gordon Brown.

"But the first priority is that the violence is brought to an end. It is unacceptable that lives are being lost."

The British premier called on the African Union and the Commonwealth to help reconcile the parties.

But Odinga refused to negotiate until Kibaki owned up to vote-rigging allegations and stepped down.

"I have asked my people to be peaceful, to desist from acts of hooliganism or thuggery, but to continue to protest peacefully until Kibaki agrees to hand over power," he said in an interview with BBC.

He had called for a one-million people mass rally tomorrow at Nairobi's Uhuru Park but the Police have banned the event.

Meanwhile, the EU election monitors released an interim report, confirming opposition claims of irregularities in the vote counting and tallying.

"The 2007 general elections have fallen short of key international and regional standards for democratic elections," chief EU monitor Alexander Graf Lambsdorff told reporters yesterday.

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"Most significantly, they were marred by a lack of transparency in the processing and tallying of presidential results, which raises concerns about the accuracy of the final result of this election."

He noted "serious inconsistencies and anomalies" in the results announced by the Kenyan Electoral Commission.

"For example, in Molo and Kieni, there were significant differences between presidential election results reported by EU observers at the constituency level and results announced by the Electoral Commission at national level," his 15-page report read.