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guardian.co.uk - UK
25 February 2009

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UN condemns executions carried

A brutal succession of hundreds of summary executions carried out with impunity by Kenyan security forces was roundly condemned today by a top UN investigator, who called on President Mwai Kibaki to sack his police chief and attorney general because of the outrage.

Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, issued one of the UN's strongest indictments yet of Kenya's culture of impunity, in a hard-hitting report following a 10-day investigation into the alleged killing of more than 1,000 gang members, insurgents, petty criminals and political protestors since 2007.

"I have received overwhelming testimony that there exists in Kenya a systematic, widespread and well-planned strategy to execute individuals," Alston told a news conference in Nairobi.

"Kenyan police are a law unto themselves. They kill often, with impunity."

His comments came a day after the government-appointed Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) released a videotaped testimony by a police constable who described in �chilling detail how he witnessed the killing of 58 people in a year while working as a driver for a police death squad. The whistleblower, Bernard Kiriinya, was himself murdered four months after giving his testimony and going into hiding in Nairobi last year.

A police spokesman today strongly denied KNCHR's allegations of extrajudicial killings, despite a mounting body of evidence against the security forces in recent years. But the strongly-worded UN report by Alston, an Australian law professor at New York University, will be far more difficult to ignore.

Alston was highly critical of Hussein Ali, the police commissioner appointed by President Mwai Kibaki from the military nearly five years ago, saying he had failed to respond adequately to any of the allegations of extrajudicial killings, and refused even to answer basic questions such as the size of the police force. Ali's "immediate dismissal" should be the first step in police reforms, Alston said.

Referring to Attorney General Amos Waki, who has kept his job since 1991 � a period of unchecked high-level corruption in the country � Alston said: "Mr Wako is the embodiment in Kenya of the phenomenon of impunity". Kibaki, who has a record of refusing to censure those close to him, regardless of the offence, also came in for strong criticism.

"His silence to date on this issue [of extrajudicial executions] is both conspicuous and problematic," Alston said.

Police killings during the post-election violence in January 2008 and a counter-insurgency campaign in western Kenya a few months later have been well documented and heavily criticised by human rights organisations.

But it is the insider details of the campaign against the Mungiki, which is notorious for its macabre initiation rituals and runs extortion rackets, that may offer the strongest evidence of planning and high-level �complicity in the extrajudicial executions.

Kiriinya, who the police say was a disgruntled deserter, described in his 90-minute video interview how a notorious criminal called Simon Matheri Ikere was shot in the back of the head by police officers while lying on his stomach. At the time police claimed Ikere had been killed after emerging from his house with an AK-47.

During the murder missions, officers disguised themselves in hired cars, and typically strangled their victims, shot them from behind or clubbed or hacked them to death, Kiriinya said. The bodies were disfigured to prevent identification and dumped in forests or remote woodland areas around Nairobi. Officers in the death squad were given bonuses of up to 15,000 shillings (�132) for "good work" after an execution, he said.

Kiriinya said that senior policemen told him that commissioner Ali sanctioned the killings and had sent his personal congratulations after one of the murders.

After recording his testimony Kiriinya briefly left Kenya for a neighbouring country but returned to Nairobi to try to arrange a permanent move to safety. On 16 October last year, he was lured out of his safe house in a upmarket area of Nairobi and shot in the back of the head. Hassan Omar Hassan, the vice chairman of KNHCR, said Kiriinya had been visited by a police officer earlier in the day � the first male visitor he had seen since going into hiding.

"All our preliminary investigations into the death indicate that the police killed him," Hassan told the Guardian.

A government statement said: "It's inconceivable that someone who has been in the country for less than 10 days can purport to have conducted comprehensive and accurate research on such a serious matter."

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guardian.co.uk - UK25 February 2009

UN condemns executions carried

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guardian.co.uk - UK
25 February 2009